Australian Football

Burnie Hawks

Originally formed in 1894, Cooee had endured two fairly prolonged spells in abeyance (1896 to 1919, and 1923 to 1929) before emerging as a pivotal force in the Burnie Football Association, in which it won a total of five flags between 1931 and 1936. In 1938 Cooee was one of four founder members of the Darwin Football Association and claimed the 1941 premiership of that competition with a 34 point grand final win over Upper Burnie.

When organised football resumed after the war in 1945 Cooee was admitted to the NWFU, bringing the number of teams in the competition up to ten. At first, the side struggled, but with accomplished players like Len Hayes, Owen Bugg, Lou Redman and Laurie Horton to the fore it broke through for its first grand final appearance in 1951, only to fall in a heap against a powerful Ulverstone side and go down by 65 points. Further losing grand final appearances followed in 1956 and 1960 before the Bulldogs broke through for their first ever NWFU flag thanks to an 8.10 (58) to 8.5 (53) grand final defeat of local rivals Burnie in 1961.

After that, it was as though the dam had broken: between 1962 and the dissolution of the NWFU at the end of the 1986 season Cooee contested another ten grand finals for half a dozen wins, making it by some measure the competition’s most successful club during that time. Its ‘elevation’ to the ranks of the TFL’s emerging statewide competition in 1987 was presumably therefore more or less automatic.

On commencing in the statewide competition, Cooee adopted the new name of the Burnie Hawks. Coached by Warren McCarthy, and with former Hawthorn star Colin Robertson as their on field leader, the Hawks were competitive from the start, finishing fifth out of ten clubs in their debut year, repeating this result in 1988, and proving consistently strong, without ever quite managing to break through for a flag, throughout their fourteen year involvement in statewide football. 

In 1995, two years after merging with NTFL side and rivals the Burnie Tigers, the new club embarked on a partnership with fledgling AFL club Fremantle, becoming known as the Burnie Dockers in the process.