Coming Home- The Sydney Swans
It went down like a drug deal. As mum and I sat dejected on a bench outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground — our prospects of scoring all but gone — a man in a cap and sunglasses sat down alongside me and took a huge bite out of his burger. Without turning to face me and whilst gnawing on a mouthful, he mumbled,
“How many are you after?”
Mum and I had racked up multiple laps around the MCG in the hours leading up to the 2005 AFL Grand Final, which despite looking promising in terms of securing tickets from a scalper, had proven fruitless. I had spotted some men who appeared to be bartering, sidled up to them and realised they were indeed making an exchange. Just as I asked if they had any spare to sell, two of the men flipped out police badges while the other two threw their heads back. I quickly scurried away to a nearby bench.
Mum had been sceptical from the start and her anxiety and frustration was evident in everything she wasn’t saying. Her pursed lips an indicator she was ruing the fact she’d agreed to my half-cocked plan. A week earlier the Sydney Swans had defeated St Kilda to win a Grand Final berth.
Standing in our seaside Manly apartment I delivered an impassioned plea to my parents. We didn’t have tickets, but we’d get them. Dad laughed and declined, at 80 years of age he felt it was too much for him. I zeroed in on mum and harped on relentlessly about the potential regret of not going. After twenty-three years of barracking for the Swans — through years of them being the pariah of the AFL — “How could we not go?” She caved. Flights and accommodation were booked.
We did not however have tickets, and thus the final and most naïve and precarious step in my plan was to procure them from a scalper. I reassured her if this failed, we could always buy standing room tickets. Mum raised her eyebrows and said nothing. Despite her doubts, we were Melbourne bound.
It would have been outrageous not to at least try to see the Sydney Swans vie for their first premiership. Mum and Dad began lugging me, their only child, along to the Swans first season when I was a few months old. My parents — both born in Melbourne — had met and married in Sydney, a city they loved. It only lacked one thing: an Aussie Rules team. They were delighted when it was decided that the South Melbourne Swans would play their ‘home’ games at the SCG in 1982. The Swans were on the verge of financial collapse and relocation loomed as their only salvation, and thus Swans officials approached the Victorian Football League (VFL) about a move. The VFL was very keen to make theirs a truly national competition and crack into a potentially lucrative Sydney market.
Many South Melbourne fans were irate about this possibility and a “Keep South at South” movement formed. Moving was akin to exile from football’s heartland. When the official relocation decision was made, the VFL president, Allen Aylett, received death and bomb threats and had faeces dumped in his pool and letterbox. Vitriol was heaped on the players who were branded ‘traitors.’
As a young kid I knew of none of this. I knew my favourite thing about the footy was getting a hot pie ‘n’ chips, an ice cream, and chasing it down with a piece of rock cake brought from home. I knew my mum, dad and the other couple of thousand Swans supporters that turned up to the SCG every game, really cared about this team that seemed to lose a lot. And I knew that following Aussie Rules in Sydney in the 80s and early 90s was incredibly daggy. It wasn’t considered ‘real’ footy in the way Rugby League and Rugby Union were. The physical contact not as brutal and ‘masculine.’ People smirked at the players’ little shorts and kids at school told me Aussie Rules was ‘gay.’No doubt parroting what they’d heard at home. In truth, I was a bit embarrassed and unsure what to think.
I seldom sat in my seat in the Ladies stand with my parents. A three-hour game was an eternity and I’d pester my dad to kick the footy with me out back. He’d spend hours playing kick or walking me up to sit behind the goal square in the Noble Stand. There was hardly anyone there so you could stand right near the fence behind the big-name forwards in the competition like Tony Modra, Gary Ablett and Dermott Brereton. After a goal you could bet on someone yelling,
“Umpire, how big’s your dick?”
The ump would signal the successful goal by dropping his two index fingers like a guillotine a foot apart. Dad and I would laugh.
When the swans scored, the cheerleading Swanettes would jig and high kick, swishing their red and white pom poms in their fishnets. I was intrigued by their extremely made-up faces and their dancing atop a makeshift stage which covered a section of seating directly behind the goal posts.
I’d chase the ball when it flew between the seats but was never a victor in the scuffle for it. I was perplexed and bothered by everyone booing Paul Roos when he ran on the field or past us and asked my mum, “Don’t they like him?” To my joyous surprise, she told me they were all cheering, “Roooooooos!”
The swans were both brilliant and hopeless. They also had a ton of critics within Melbourne clubs willing them to fail. Resentment bubbled: the apparent unfairness of the VFL buoying the Swans financially while they found their feet was unpalatable.
The Swans monetary woes dragged on for years as they tried to etch themselves into Sydney’s sporting landscape. They couldn’t support themselves with a non-existent membership base. Sydney’s exorbitant cost of living made it difficult to find players decent accommodation. It was difficult to secure training fields as Rugby League teams took precedence; at times they wound up training in parklands or a cliff top near Maroubra beach.
Sometimes I’d complain about having to go, but I had no say in it. Looking back now — my parent’s commitment seems even more remarkable given how dire the Swans performance was in the early 90s, including a 26-game losing streak spanning the 1992 and ‘93 seasons. Times were so desperate at one stage Swans players roamed the streets to giving away free tickets. And people turned them down. But there was something that kept them going. It was never considered that we would not go.
The steady exposure to hours spent alongside my mum and dad watching the Swans became a part of my childhood, my adolescence, our family life. Part of me.
My mum, always stylishly attired, and who was mostly a reserved woman, would shriek — “In the back! That’s a free.”I would watch in hysterics as she would have Tourette’s-like attacks; unleashing a torrent of expletives when she deemed the umpires unfair. Dad would cringe while attempting to hide behind his hand.
Things began to change in the early 90s.
Ron Barassi arrived as coach in 1993. Then Tony “Plugger” Lockett came in 1995, the same year Paul Kelly won the Brownlow. Sydneysiders recognised these names and the Swans profile and support base grew. And they began to win. I’d never felt the crowd at the SCG pulse the way it did when Plugger kicked a behind after the siren against Essendon in an SCG Preliminary. They were off to the 1996 Grand Final. Though on the day they were destroyed by North Melbourne.
Despite the beat downs and the critics, we could see and feel their heart. Their potential. We weathered the losses as fans because we could see effort was there, and that’s why we were there too. Back then nobody called it the ‘Bloods’ culture: we simply saw the Swans get back up each time they were knocked down.
By the time I was in my early twenties in the early two-thousands going to a Swans game was fashionable and representative of a wide-ranging sporting palate. I’d sometimes meet up with friends at matches, but I always wound up sitting back with mum and dad. The three of us in our spot, always the same seats on the lower level of the Ladies stand. I just wanted to watch the footy with the two people I most enjoyed watching it with.
I hesitate to say the time span between the Swans inaugural 1982 season and their making the 2005 Grand Final against West Coast was a journey we were part of. But rather, time spent at the SCG was a dependable mainstay for our little family that I have recognised only with age.
And so it was, that mum and I were sitting on a bench with a bloke and his burger, who claimed the two tickets he had were ‘amazing’ seats that belonged to a Brownlow medallist who wasn’t keen on attending a Grand Final between two non-Melbourne teams. They were pricey, but we had no choice. We’d soon find out if we’d been duped. Turns out we had the best seats in the house. First elevation, in line with the bounce. We were in disbelief and more than a little anxious we’d be found out.
As the first quarter got going, we began to relax, however the stress of the close game took over. Mum kept burying her head in her hands and appeared on the verge of cardiac arrest for most of the game. When Leo Barry took his famed mark in the dying seconds and the crowd near him erupted, we knew the Swans had won. Their first Premiership in seventy-two years, and their first as the Sydney Swans. The energy that coursed through that stadium was palpable. I was completely deafened by noise as mum and I embraced, exhausted.
Not long after the Grand Final my parents separated. And in the years since, both of my parents have passed away. I didn’t go to the Swans for years after the 2005 Grand Final. It had taken twenty-three years to reach that pinnacle, now I felt like no other game of footy could top that experience. The next year I went travelling. I fell in love, got married, had babies and toddlers. I was busy with other things, and I also felt like if I couldn’t be all in, I didn’t want to be in at all. I didn’t want to watch games here and there. That’s just who I am.
In 2019 I felt compelled to watch the Swans on telly. I really missed my mum, who had died suddenly a couple of years earlier, and watching the Swans made me feel connected to her, and my dad.
That season, I took my three kids to their first Swans game. When I walked into the SCG and heard the Swans song I cried. It was like walking into the house I grew up in. I realised I had grown up here too. This was a big part of my life I’d disowned.
Since then, my family has gone to every game we possibly can. My husband, three kids and I drove down to attend the 2022 Grand Final against the Cats. It hurt to watch our team — so dominant during the season — lose themselves on the ground. Sometimes that happens in footy. Sometimes that happens in life. Regardless of the final score, it was where I wanted to be.
