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Professor Brian Matthews is an author and broadcaster, and holds a Personal Chair in English at Flinders University, Adelaide.
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On July 10, 1858, Thomas Wentworth Wills, a prominent playing member of the Melbourne Cricket Club, wrote to Bell's Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle about a matter that had been causing him growing concern, namely the fact that in the off-season, cricketers “assumed somewhat of the chrysalis nature”; they became idle, in short. And even though, as Wills readily and rather floridly conceded, the cricketers would “again burst forth in all their varied hues” as the earth turned and the sun warmed once more over the antipodes, there was still a great need to stave off the “torpor” of winter. His solution was to “form a football club.” Thomas Wills's amiable letter has passed into history: in it lie the origins of a unique, exciting, and remarkable game that brings most of Australia to a standstill on the last Saturday of each September and which dominates the minds and hearts of otherwise temperate and circumspect Australians throughout vast sections of the continent for the whole of the southern winter. This obsession is known as Australian Rules Football.
Though some form of football had been played in Melbourne since about 1840, what has become known as the foundation game took place on August 7, 1858 with Wills playing a prominent organizational role. Teams were drawn from the pupils of Scotch College and the Church of England Grammar School; the venue was a large stretch of land normally used by the Melbourne Cricket Club; and the action was spread over three Saturdays, ending in a one-all draw! Wills duly became a member of the newly formed Melbourne Football Club and was part of a committee, set up in May of the following year, charged with the task of drawing up rules for an Australian version of football.
The readiest football model to hand for Wills when considering the shape of the Australian game was, of course, rugby. Yet, for somewhat curious though also admirably practical reasons, Wills turned his back on the English influence. In Rugby, especially the scrummage, Wills saw too much of a premium placed on “brute force”; in turn, this spawned injuries which, while possibly of less consequence to schoolboys, could seriously hamper grown men whose major responsibility was to their daily work. This important decision was the first of several that would set Australian Rules apart from most other football codes and lay the groundwork for its uniqueness.
But serendipity, whim and chance continued to dominate the general presentation and arrangement of matches and how they were conducted until 1886. In that year Henry Harrison—the “father of Australian Football”—refined the Melbourne Club rules and the lineaments of the game were finally established. Like Wills, Harrison spurned the imperial models and Australian Rules emerged as a highly individual phenomenon, its most revolutionary innovation being the deliberate rejection of the offside rule, a distinction the Australian code shares with only one other form of football in the world—modern Gaelic football. But, contrary to long-held belief, there is no evidence of imitation or influence. Australian Rules, as historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey puts it, “is essentially an Australian invention.”
Pioneered by privileged public school boys, who had the leisure to devote to football, encouraged by anglophile schoolmasters who saw it as a way to “manliness”, and adopted by cricketers as a winter pastime, the game of Australian Rules football seemed destined to become class-based in the manner of rugby. In fact, however, it very quickly became woven into the fabric of ordinary Melbourne life at all levels. From 1856, the eight-hour working day had become generally available to a range of workers and, while this meant Saturday work, the Saturday afternoon holiday, already available to clerks and office workers, was being more and more widely claimed. With leisure time on their hands, workers, and, incidentally, large numbers of women, were among those who flocked in even greater numbers to the contests. By the time the breakaway Victorian Football League (VFL) was formed in 1896, teams were firmly identified with various inner Melbourne “suburbs” and their exploits were watched, debated, cheered, derided, and anticipated by local adherents with a passion and loyalty that coloured the whole working week and dominated Melbourne's grey winter months—the one “real” winter, it is often claimed, on mainland Australia.
Australian Rules Football, which by its nature can never be an international competition, is now a national game with teams in five of the six states. Outside Melbourne, where 10 of the 16 Australian Football League (AFL) teams remain resident, it arouses comparable fanaticism. But Melbourne, at the centre of the AFL's many controversies as it plots a rocky course through a time of great change in the management and presentation of sport, continues to be the quintessential Australian Rules city (several of Melbourne's multicoloured trams announce: “Welcome to Melbourne—The Home of Aussie Rules”). Team allegiances and fortunes suffuse Melbourne life and over the years some of the major issues of the day—such as sectarianism, racism, media monopoly, the impact of economic rationalism—have surfaced in and been clearly focused by the panoply of the football season.
AFL games are played throughout the year in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Perth but the competition still climaxes each year in Melbourne—at the Melbourne cricket Ground (MCG), adjacent to that same stretch of parkland where the first straggly game took place in August 1858. In the last week of September each year, Melbourne stops for the Grand Final of the “footy”: the two teams parade through the streets, tickets are competed for legally and illegally, interstate fanatics arrive in their thousands, and on the Saturday 100,000 people at the ground, and millions of others fixated on the television screen or glued to Radio Australia, have eyes and ears for nothing else.
Australia's own sporting “invention” mirrors some of the country's more pressing dilemmas as the new century looms. Inflated entrepreneurialism, progressive surrender to the concept of market forces, and growing pressure from media magnates all threaten the game's autonomy and deeply ingrained democratic strain; while racism and the multicultural debate are precisely imaged in various of the AFL's on-field and off-field crises.
Yet the game's the thing: when the teams burst on to the ground through their multicoloured banners, greeted typically by 30,000 or 40,000 supporters, dissent and controversy temporarily melt in the spectacular fury of one of the oldest and greatest football codes on earth.
Appears in
Australian Rules Football; Australia
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