Devils’ Song Choice Is a Small Test of a Big Idea

Somewhere between the pageantry of Kylie Minogue serenading 100,000 people at the MCG and the quieter business of a selection panel choosing a jingle for a club that does not yet exist on a ladder, there is a modest but instructive story about how the Tasmania Devils intend to introduce themselves to the competition. The club has confirmed it wants both female and male voices on the official recording of its team song, which would be an AFL first, and the panel charged with the decision is expected to land on a version by year’s end.

It is a small thing, in the scheme of stadium funding agreements and draft concessions and all the other machinery that has attended Tasmania’s admission to the competition. But small things often tell you more about an organisation’s instincts than the large ones do, and this is worth a moment of genuine consideration rather than a shrug.

A Genuinely Uncharted Piece of Club Furniture

Every other team song in the competition arrived by accident of history. Most were written decades ago, in idioms and arrangements that reflect the era of their composition, and clubs have mostly left them alone out of affection rather than any considered view on inclusivity. Tasmania has no such legacy to defend or apologise for. It gets to choose, from a standing start, what its song sounds like and who sings it, and it has decided that the answer ought to include a female voice.

I do not think this ought to be treated as a radical departure from footy tradition, because in truth there is no tradition here to depart from. There is only a blank page, and the club has chosen to fill it in a way that reflects the audience it hopes to attract rather than the audience footy songs were historically written for. That seems to me a sensible piece of housekeeping rather than a statement of ideology, though I accept plenty of good-humoured argument will be had about it in pubs from Hobart to Devonport over the coming months.

The Broader Project of Building From Scratch

What strikes me most is how consistent this decision is with everything else Tasmania has said about itself since the licence was confirmed. The club has talked repeatedly about wanting to reflect the whole state, not just the traditional footy heartlands, and about building a supporter base that includes women and younger fans who have not necessarily grown up steeped in the sport the way previous generations were. A team song with a female voice on the record is a low-cost, high-visibility way of signalling that intent, and expansion clubs the world over have long understood that the symbolic gestures made in year zero tend to set the tone for everything that follows.

The AFLW competition has, whatever its financial and structural growing pains, demonstrably widened the pool of people who consider themselves genuinely invested in the game rather than merely tolerant of a partner’s obsession. A club being built in 2025 rather than 1897 would be negligent not to design itself with that reality in mind, and the song is one of the more visible ways to do it.

Governance by Committee, for Better or Worse

There is something quietly reassuring, from a governance perspective, about the fact this is being handled by a selection panel with a defined timeline rather than settled by captain’s call from the top of the club. Expansion projects live or die on the discipline of their processes, and a considered, publicly explained method for choosing something as symbolically loaded as a team song is a reasonable proxy for how the wider organisation intends to conduct itself. Commissions and club boards alike ought to take some comfort from seeing a new franchise treat even its more ceremonial decisions with structure rather than improvisation.

That said, panels can also produce compromise for compromise’s sake, and there is a genuine risk that a song designed to please everyone ends up rousing no one. The best team songs in the competition are not universally loved for their musical sophistication; they are loved because generations of supporters have bellowed them arm in arm after final sirens, badly and joyously, until the words became inseparable from the feeling of victory itself. Tasmania cannot manufacture that history overnight, and no amount of careful process will substitute for the ten or twenty years of premierships, near misses and grand final day tears that eventually make a club song sacred to its people.

What This Says About the Seventeenth Club’s Instincts

I have written before, and will no doubt write again, about the commercial logic underpinning Tasmania’s entry to the competition, and about the genuine questions that remain over stadium funding and long-term financial sustainability on an island with a population smaller than several AFL club memberships combined. Those are the substantial questions, and they will not be settled by a jingle.

But an organisation’s culture is revealed as much in its small choices as its large ones, and a club that thinks carefully about who sings its anthem is, in my view, more likely to think carefully about who fills its board, who coaches its women’s and men’s programs, and who it consults when working out how to serve a state that has waited the best part of a century for a licence of its own. It would be an overreach to claim a song settles any of that. It would be an equal overreach to dismiss it as irrelevant.

A Reasonable Way to Mark Grand Final Day

Kylie Minogue’s turn at the MCG this weekend is a reminder of how much spectacle now surrounds the last Saturday in September, and how comfortably the AFL has learned to sit alongside broader Australian entertainment culture without losing its own identity in the process. Tasmania’s team song decision operates on a much smaller stage, but it points in a similar direction: a competition, and now a new club within it, thinking about who is in the room and who is singing along.

Whether the recording itself becomes a beloved fixture of finals footy will depend on results the club has not yet had the chance to earn. But as a piece of early positioning, choosing to be genuinely first on this front rather than a reluctant follower strikes me as a sound and well-considered decision, and one other clubs contemplating their own musical archaeology might reasonably take note of.