FotoFreo PO Box 681, Fremantle Western 6959 Australie
Fremantle Club 15 Bannister St WA 6160 Fremantle Australie
Commissioned by FotoFreo, this project will look at six of Fremantle’s social clubs, which have played such a vital role in the community’s history but are now facing declining and ageing membership. Award-winning photojournalist David Dare Parker will produce the exhibition and combine with writer Ron Davidson to produce a limited edition book, which will be launched during FotoFreo 2010.
I am sitting at one end of the freshly painted bar at the Fremantle Workers Social and Leisure Club. It is lunchtime. The bar is busy over all of its 30 metres; as is the café and TAB which in another age was the club library and reading room. I ask my neighbour his name and whether he’d like a drink. His name is Arty and he declines the drink with grace. He hasn’t had a drink since 1970. Why then does he keep coming to the heartland of Fremantle drinking? He tells me he is 86 and comes to the club whenever he feels like a chat. He chats of taking over his father’s union ticket in 1957 and coming on to the wharf: lumping was a family business then unless you happened to be a footballer. He chats of 400 lumpers’ bikes stacked outside the ferry terminal and not one was stolen; and how wharfies came over to the club for their schooners at lunch or smoko and of the some solid drinking ‘until stumps (11 pm)’ which destroyed Arty’s liver. Also how Paddy Troy, the Fremantle workers’ saint, was black-balled from the club and who did the deed. ‘There was no Commies in the Workers’ Club’ says Arty without explaining why. There were also no women and workers could wear their work hats up to the bar.
Now there are women everywhere. The club is flourishing again. However, when ships’ cargoes started to be carried in containers rather than on men’s shoulders, thousands of wharfies and woolies left town. Other clubs closed or became sad places…
© Ron Davidson