West CoastWest Coast
After just 1 year football was replaced with rugby as the number 1 winter sport in Western Australia. Football was first played in 1880, rugby took over in 1881. It took two young men who had just returned to Fremantle from Adelaide (where they just finished school) to get football going again.
The choice between the two codes must have been a fine one when the Fremantle Rugby Club was convinced to make the swaps. ‘The Fremantle’ was the first club in the newly formed WAFA, the first team in the Perth area was ‘The Rovers’. The team from the port was the most dominant club winning 6 flags in a row, the first in 1891.
Gold strikes in 1892 changed the face of football in WA. Some Victorian footballers crossed the Nullarbor to try their luck at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. Within a couple of years Coolgardie’s population reached 15,000, the town was a magnet for fit young men, a lot of them were football players in Melbourne. The biggest name of them all to cross to WA was Essendon’s Albert Thurgood.
Western Australia soon became the second strongest state in Australia, second only to Victoria. In the early 1930’s South Melbourne decided to use WA as part of it’s premiership campaign. By the late 1930’s Victorian’s were packing up and moving to WA just to play football.
Many of the WA clubs didn’t like there players moving east, but by the 1980’s Victorian clubs were keeping these clubs financially stable. In 1983, seven of the eight WAFL clubs were insolvent. When the call for a national league came, WA clubs jumped at the chance.
Knowing the capacity of WA footballers, Victorian clubs were a bit worried when a team from Perth would play in the VFL. The new club had to find ways of funding the club, first to pay for the $4 million licence, and then to keep the club going. Indian Pacific Limited was the company formed to operate the new team, called the West Coast Eagles. Indian Pacific put the club on the stock exchange, but public response wasn’t as great as expected.
The club then made a plea to all Western Australians, playing in Victoria to come back home to play football. West Coast was taken to court in an attempt to get the Hawthorn pair Gary Buckenara and Paul Harding. In the end Hawthorn got to keep both players. The Eagles may have lost this battle but in years to come there wasn’t many more losses, on and off the field.
In Brief
Joined League: 1987
Premierships: 2
Premiership years: 1992, 1994.
Brownlom Medalists: None
