Smiles aplenty as Crocs turn 20
WARNING to tourists - when conversing with locals about Crocs this month, please be aware the natives are talking about a locally famed footy club celebrating 20 years playing our national sport, not ugly footwear. Bruce Cutler reports on the region’s most successful senior sporting team celebrating its second decade.
Port Douglas Football Club getting built
With Australian Rules Football putting on celebrations across the nation to mark the 150th year of the game, there is also a huge local interest growing for another footy party that is to be held here soon.
Known by locals simply as “The Crocs”, the Port Douglas AFL Football Club is holding a celebratory dinner on July 5 befitting the place that Qld’s most northern Aussie Rules club has earnt itself after 20 years in the sport.
Over 300 loyal Crocs supporters and former players are expected to descend on Port Douglas from across state and international borders to help celebrate and commemorate two decades of blood, sweat, cheers, beers and tears, all spilt in the name of the club’s navy blue and white jersey.
Since its inception in 1989, the Crocs have become the most successful adult sporting outfit in the Douglas region after only missing the finals twice in the past 19 years and now also boast a junior membership that has grown to include 10 different under age teams.
Three senior premierships in 1991, 2001 and 2005 stand alongside many reserve grade flags and the national headlines the club was drawn into following a violence-marred 2004 Grand Final loss.
A clubhouse and its own home ground – The Croc Pit - were far away dreams when the club first started in 1988 out as being simply an idea among Victorian AFL fans who had moved north of Cairns.
Over 1000 players now can lay claims to having turned out in the Crocs colours since the club started.
To find some of the real blue and white blood that pumps through the heart of this organisation’s ongoing success it is hard to look past the balding pate and bushy moustache of a club stalwart like Andy Smith.
Smith was part of an building army that descended on Port Douglas in 1987 chasing work as the town’s construction boom slowly transformed the former fishing village into the five-star resort Mecca it is today.
While looking to make a quick buck and have some fun in the Far North Qld sun, Smith, a 28-year-old Melbournite, was like many other young Victorian workers in FNQ missing his Aussie Rules because it was yet to gain popularity in the Sunshine State.
“There was no Aussie Rules on the telly, nothing on at the pub and I used to get tapes made of (Victorian) games and mates used to come around and watch it.”
The growing audience at Smith’s home of builders and labourers up from Victoria thirsting for southern footy action must have planted a few seeds in his mind.
He approached the Cairns AFL league about his idea that with so many non-Qld Mexicans working in Port Douglas there would be enough players to form an Aussie Rules club.
In December 1988, a meeting was called at the Port Douglas Life Saving Club and about 80 people signed up to start the footy club.
Smith was elected president, Ernie Baxter was vice-president and a five-member committee was formed. Meetings and a player sign-on were held the next month at Baxter’s home which also served as the clubhouse for the next few years.
A month before the Croc’s inaugural season was to begin, president Smith kicked the first goal for the new club by attending a golf skins tournament and sidling up to the biggest businessman at the time in town, the late notorious developer Christopher Skase.
Skase had brought up to Port Douglas some of the world’s best golfers to play a skins tournament on his Mirage golf course and while the Great White Shark, Greg Norman, was lining up his putt at the fifth hole, Smith was lining up Skase.
Most Crocs signed-players worked at Skase’s Sheraton Mirage or on its construction. Skase already owned the Brisbane Bears AFL team so Smith asked the businessman if he would like to also sponsor the local Port Douglas team and got an affirmative answer and $20,000 for his troubles.
First training sessions took place at Reynolds Park on Davidson St.
Council gave approval for club games to be played on the Mossman show ground oval as long as the show society and Mossman Sharks Rugby League Club were not using the oval first.
Before the first pre-season game of 1989 the club held a team bonding session at Cape Tribulation. “An 18-year-old Mackay kid came up with the club song while we were all having a beer sitting on Cape Trib beach and we’re still singing the same song 20 years later,” Smith recalled.
The Crocs made the finals in their first year finishing overall third on the ladder.
To build on the success, the club placed ads in Victorian newspapers during the off-season promoting the abundant available work and laid-back lifestyle on offer for footy players wishing to join the Port Douglas club.
“It just went crazy,” Smith recalled. “I was constantly going back and forth to Cairns airport picking them (new recruits) up.”
Rob Hubbard was appointed captain/coach and in 1990 went one better than the previous year by making the Grand Final but the Crocs were thrashed by Centrals and finished runners-up.
Hubbard stayed on as coach and history was created the following year when the Crocs brought home the premiership flag in only the club’s third year.
The team created a number of sporting records through the 1991 season including twice reaching 400 points in a game.
The title showed that despite the Crocs having basic training facilities, no clubhouse and no home ground; it did have club spirit and passion by the bucket-load.
As could be expected, the celebrations in Port Douglas following the Grand Final were also the stuff of legend.
A club treasure hunt list was drawn up with a variety of unusual items that hunt teams were required to bring back to the Central Hotel which has been the Crocs bar for all but one year of the club’s existence. Police were required to attend to reports of borrowed golf buggies and forklifts being last seen heading in the direction of the Central Hotel.
At one point a Japanese tourist was kidnapped by some burly footballers, placed with the growing pile of treasure items at the Central were she waited half an hour before leaving so her captors could be awarded their points for finding another listed item.
Rod Davison, who is still coaching juniors with the club today, picked up best and fairest player awards at both club and Cairns league levels from 1989 to 1992 seasons.
By 1993 the club had marked their 100th game in the Cairns league but realised it needed to move from the Mossman show grounds and started campaigning to get land donated from council for sporting oval use.
The former Port Douglas rubbish tip in mangrove swamps adjoining the Mirage Marina had been filled with silt during the marina construction and it was decided to use the reclaimed land aside to build the Crocs field of dreams.
The dumped dirt was bulldozed over, 50 Crocs club members and their partners spent weeks pulling out by hand every bit of rock and glass they could find in the soil before an Aboriginal claim on the land stopped any further development for clubrooms.
The club operated out of demountable buildings for dressing sheds and a tarpaulin covered canteen over the next two years until the Aboriginal land claimants dropped their actions.
The Crocs negotiated a $130,000 loan from Cairns AFL and the shell of today’s clubhouse was built within 12 months.
Two additional teams to start a junior crocs club were | 
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