Fremantle Dockers: Why a first AFL flag would be ‘bigger than the America’s Cup’ for the port city

Fremantle. Boats. Bon Scott. Bohemia.

Home of the America’s Cup and an AFL team that has become as reliable as the afternoon “Doctor” that cools the metropolis in the summer months.

Just as Dennis Conner and Stars & Stripes did in that famous 1987 yacht race, the Dockers are about to make the port city hip again.

Politicians, restaurateurs, fishermen and women, comedian Rove McManus, musicians and former NBA player Luc Longley, who played alongside Michael Jordan in the Chicago Bulls’ 1996-1998 three-peat, are among the devotees.

Purple, it seems, is the new black.

That is predominantly the colour of the Dockers, the team’s jumper adorned with white chevrons which salute the V-shaped guernsey worn by the original Fremantle Football Club in 1885.

The Nightly spoke to fans, administrators and former players about the phenomenon that is the Fremantle Dockers and just what makes this club so different from the rest of the AFL competition.

The State’s Treasurer and Deputy Premier Rita Saffioti hopes the team’s 2026 home-and-away season, in which they finished a game clear at the top of the ladder, is a sign that silverware is not far away.

If it’s not this year it could be next, with most pundits giving the team a four to five-year window.

Whenever it comes, Saffioti says it will be big.

How big?

“Bigger than the America’s Cup,” she said.

“It would be the biggest thing to happen to Fremantle. The party would stretch all the way from Success (Fremantle’s headquarters) down the Canning Highway, all the way down to the Esplanade. It would reward the loyalty of so many fans who bleed purple.”

The City of Fremantle has a rich history that predates the State’s capital Perth by a few months.

The first permanent settlement of the Swan River Colony in 1829, by 1850 it had become Western Australia’s primary destination for convicts. Its spectacular limestone prison, constructed between 1852 and 1859, remains a citadel, overlooking the hospital and Fremantle Oval, home of WAFL team South Fremantle.

The prison was operational until 1991, its alumni including the late AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, who spent a brief time there as a teenager in 1963. A statue of the singer takes pride of place in the city’s fishing village.

Fremantle Oval was the original home base of the Dockers, when they wore red, green and purple with a white anchor — a symbol pessimistic supporters believe has weighed the team down — before the club moved its administration and training base to Success in the City of Cockburn in 2017, a year before it also shifted home games from Subiaco Oval to the 60,000-capacity Optus Stadium.

Fremantle has a population of 37,500 and remains a critical economic hub for the State through tourism (mainly retail and hospitality), shipping, marine logistics, fisheries and defence, generating a gross regional product of $5.56 billion in 2024-25.

Tourists flood its signature market and embrace an alternative “bohemian” lifestyle and thriving music scene — Eskimo Joe, Tame Impala, Spacey Jane, San Cisco, John Butler Trio and The Waifs all have close ties with the city.

But the AFL club remains the city’s pride and joy, even if it is no longer officially housed there.

Retired restaurateur Nunzio Gumina, the son of Italian migrants who shifted from Sicily after World War II, has owned or part-owned 42 businesses around Fremantle.

As the owner of Old Papa’s Cafe, he was credited with creating the alfresco dining and coffee revolution in the city’s popular cappuccino strip. A restaurant named in his honour, Nunzio’s, still operates out of nearby Essex Street.

By the time the Dockers played their first game in 1995, the State’s other AFL team, the West Coast Eagles, had become an AFL powerhouse, claiming the first premiership by a team outside Victoria in 1992 and backing it up two years later.

Before Fremantle made its debut — with a five-point loss to Richmond at the MCG on April Fools’ Day — Gumina was paid a visit by the Dockers’ inaugural coach, CEO and chair, Gerard Neesham, David Hatt and Ross Kelly.

“They said to me, ‘We are going to be the new AFL team. It’s going to be called the Fremantle Dockers and we want to know what you expect from us’,” Gumina recalled.

“I replied, ‘Whatever you do, make sure it’s good for Fremantle. That’s all I care about. It’s got to be good for the community of Fremantle’.

“To their credit, that’s all they were interested in. Whatever they did, it had to be done in Fremantle. Whether it was the end-of-year function, whether it was supporting the local restaurants and cafes and businesses, they did everything for Fremantle.

“They trained at Fremantle Oval, the players would walk up and down the cappuccino strip and say hello to everybody.

“They started coming in for lunch often because their office was nearby . . . I started to feed all the players and staff every Monday night.

“I didn’t make any money out of it, but I was supporting the club because I knew that they were going to do it tough. Everybody loves an underdog and Fremantle was an underdog.”

Saffioti grew up in Roleystone, a scenic suburb in the Perth Hills, and spent her weekends working on the family orchard alongside her older sister Connie. She did not have much time to play sport, but would listen to WAFL games broadcast on radio and recalls an East-South Fremantle derby.

“South was losing and seemed a bit hard done by. My sister and I said to each other, ‘We should go for South’, and that’s how it started with Fremantle,” Saffioti said.

“When my sister got her driver’s licence and I was 11, we started going to every South Fremantle home-and-away game. It became part of our weekly routine.

“We would go to the game and buy our chicken and chips, got to know all the grounds really well. It was a beautiful time.

“There’s nothing quite like it. It’s a game that doesn’t stop. It’s a game of enormous skill and endurance.

“That’s why so many people are going to games and it draws people from everywhere, different demographics, families. And it’s always been an enjoyable, safe environment to be around. That’s my impression of the game.”

The sisters signed up with the West Coast Eagles when they joined the then Victorian Football League in 1987 and for a season, in 1995, were dual members of both the Eagles and Dockers.

But the pull to Fremantle was always going to win.

“We’ve been rabid Dockers supporters ever since they started. It’s a real underdog thing coming through like it was with South Fremantle,” Saffioti said.

“We always support the underdogs and the Dockers, of course, were always the underdogs. A little brother, trying to prove their worth.

“The thing about Freo fans is we are special because we’ve experienced a lot. We’ve had some really weird things happen to us, like Sirengate (a 2006 draw with St Kilda in Tasmania was overturned four days later when the AFL ruled the final siren sounded 10 seconds before play stopped and the Saints kicked a behind that tied the match), an umpire marking the ball in a game.

“We didn’t get the priority picks or the concessions that the new teams have got when we were set up. We started, in a sense, on the back foot. It has been hard graft.”

Hatt, the Dockers’ first CEO, said the Dockers were handicapped at the outset but it had helped the club form its own identity.

“West Coast was such a dominant force because they had player rules that were entirely different and very generous and we suffered as a result,” Hatt said.

“To the extent that (the AFL’s director of football operations) Ian Collins told Ross Kelly (Fremantle’s inaugural chair) and myself that the rules were designed for us to win either zero or one game in our first season.

“He told us straight out. And we got no real help from the WA Football Commission because they saw the Eagles as their sacred cow. They were a beast then. They’d won the 92 premiership. They were about to win the 94 premiership when we were set up.

“They were so dominant, the reaction from the Victorian clubs in particular was, ‘Hey, something’s going on here, we’re not going to have another giant’. So that was the reason why we got such little assistance through our player rules.”

Like the Eagles in 1986, the Dockers had to pay $4 million for their AFL licence, but the Eagles had already stolen much of the corporate ground.

By 2003 that debt had ballooned to $8m and its owner, the WA Football Commission, with Kelly on the board, threw Fremantle a lifeline and allowed the club to forsake royalty payments (which were 80 per cent of the Eagles’ and Dockers’ profits) after successive losses totalling $4.2m.

“It enabled us to retain funds and make suitable investments in things like clubrooms and whatever. So the whole picture changed in the early 2000s, but prior to that, it was a continuous struggle,” Hatt said.

“A lot of people don’t realise how difficult it was at our beginning. We were required by the Football Commission to charge for our commercial properties, signage and coterie groups and what have you, at exactly the same level as West Coast.

“Now, the Eagles were the most popular club in Australia, in terms of memberships and whatever else, so I would go to prospective sponsors and try and sell them a private box, for example, and they’d say, ‘That’s the same as the Eagles are asking, why wouldn’t I just go to the Eagles?’

“I was not going to tell them how to spend their money. Ours was a diminished product, if you like, in comparison with West Coast, who were out there in commercial land.

“It was a really hard sell and that was a serious problem for us, which we eventually got over. It wasn’t easy to keep the commercial balance as it should be.

“That’s my sad story and it was hard work, but very enjoyable. I wouldn’t swap the seven years that I was there for anything. It was an experience.”

Kelly, the inaugural chair, said West Coast “had two thirds of Western Australia already following the Eagles” when the Dockers launched.

“If we had tried to imitate the Eagles, we would have always been inevitably a poor cousin,” Kelly said.

“So what we set out to do was to try and differentiate ourselves. We tried to capture what we saw as the spirit of Fremantle, which was working class, egalitarian, based on a discrete bit of geography.

“Everything from the name to the colours was designed to differentiate ourselves from other clubs.

“We did it hard. We weren’t designed to be successful. We were designed to not weaken the Eagles, but not to threaten the Victorian clubs.

“In terms of the financial assistance we were given, the player list we were able to access, all of those things made it extremely difficult.

“In the first year we were given a $2.1 million salary cap, which was $200,000 over the salary cap at that stage, and we were told by the (WA) Football Commission we could only spend $900,000 of it.

“I smile when I see how much money they’re going to give Tasmania. Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney . . . they’ve been given millions and millions and billions of dollars. We were given nothing.”

The club has saluted its maritime links with a spine-tingling catch-cry, Wharfie Time, an apt metaphor for the rough seas the Dockers have had to negotiate across 32 years of existence.

Wharfie Time, which the AFL applied to trademark in April this year so it can control commercial merchandise and league branding, is used sparingly, but there is no doubting its power — a boat tackling massive waves appears on the big screen late in selected tight games, accompanied by an iconic gong and intro from the AC/DC song Hells Bells, with a heartbeat providing a pulsating bassline.

It was used to great effect against Hawthorn in Perth in round nine this season and, fittingly, was first referenced by club legend and former captain Matthew Pavlich before a game against the Hawks in 2009.

Paul Hasleby, an East Fremantle product who played 208 games for the Dockers, recalls the players came up with the phrase at a pre-season team-building session that season.

“It was our trademark, referencing the hard-working blue-collar workforce of those that worked on the wharves. We wanted to reflect our namesake,” he said.

“That’s what we reflected back on after every performance, on whether we lived up to the trademark. The values of a wharfie.

“Then of course it was Pav who put it into language, when he said, ‘Pull on your Superman cape, it’s Wharfie Time’.

“It was a big game. We had the national audience and the cameras had access to his pre-game address. Everybody thought it was quite quirky at the time, but for us it had meaning, that being a wharfie enabled us to have superpowers if we abided by our trademark.”

Scott Watters was the club’s inaugural vice-captain in 1995, returning home from a stint with the Sydney Swans after making his league debut with the West Coast Eagles.

It was a homecoming, having grown up in Hamilton Hill, about 5km south of Fremantle.

He recalls a conversation with Fremantle’s first captain Ben Allan in the middle of Waverley, when the Swans were playing Hawthorn, the year before.

“The question was, ‘Are you coming home?’ And I said, ‘Yes, are you?’ And he said, ‘Yes’. So it’s probably the first conversation between two Fremantle players,” he said.

“My reason for coming back was I grew up in Fremantle. I roamed the streets of Fremantle as a young kid. That was my backyard.

“I would jump through a hole in the fence at Fremantle Oval to watch Maurice Rioli, Stephen Michael, Simon Outhwaite, the list goes on.

“My boyhood dream was to represent South Fremantle Footy Club and to watch a (WAFL) derby and feel the whole town come alive, and the streets and the shops and the rivalry. That was the heartbeat to me of West Australian football right there.

“As a kid I’d hitchhike to Fremantle, play pinball machines and get in trouble and jump through the back of the fence at South Fremantle Oval and try to pinch a footy.

“So when the opportunity to come back arose, the reason why I did it is because I felt like Fremantle deserved a really strong seat at the table of Australian football culture, because it’s such a football community. And I wanted to come back and represent that.

“I was lucky to be a part of West Coast. A fantastic club. But the biggest difference will always be, one has been born from legitimate Fremantle football history, and the other was an enterprise that was set up without really a geographical location. That’s the difference. And it’s in the DNA of both clubs.

“One is a great club in West Coast, going through a challenging time, and Fremantle is on its way to being a great club.”

Shaun McManus was regarded as the heart-and-soul player of the Dockers across 228 games.

A member of the Channel 7 commentary team, he retains strong ties with the club and believes Wharfie Time is an accurate representation of what the players built and the current list is trying to achieve.

“It recognises the culture that’s out of Fremantle. The history is enormous. Before Freo made the AFL, the two Freo teams in our State league, East and South Fremantle, had a culture bigger than anywhere else,” he said.

“Big-time clubs, big-time players, won a lot of premierships.

“We were all talking about Wharfie Time and obviously Pav coined it when he made that speech, but it had been around a little bit, and it’s really to do with rolling up your sleeves, let’s get to work, we’re all in it together and let’s crack on.”

McManus agrees with the Deputy Premier that a Fremantle premiership will launch the party to end all parties.

“It’ll be mayhem for days,” he said.

“Everyone will be celebrating an even bigger moment than what happened with the America’s Cup.

“You will go down to Freo to join in the party and never go home.”