MATTHEW NICHOLSON, BOB STEWART, GREG de MOORE and ROB HESS Australia’s Game: The History of Australian Football. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
As a single-volume history of the growth and development of Australian football, Australia’s Game has much to recommend it.
When a book consists of 784 pages and 54 chapters, it’s a big book. But when it also contains 2517 endnotes and has a bibliography that includes references to 118 newspapers, around 80 annual reports, letters and minute books, and 700 secondary sources (books, articles, reports), it’s obvious that the four authors have read widely on their topic.
The question then becomes what to do with this mass of information, and Matthew Nicholson, Bob Stewart, Greg de Moore and Rob Hess have succeeded admirably in their selection process, producing an absorbing narrative.
The book broadly follows a chronological structure, although with a mix of thematic chapters. This works well most of the time, except for some clunky chapter titles and sub-headings. It might have been better to have organised the text instead into four designated parts, particularly as the history can be viewed in terms of 40-year eras: the first covering the nineteenth century and dealing with the origins and establishment of an amateur game in Melbourne followed by a national push; the second detailing the beginnings of a semi-professional game up to the Second World War, still having a national agenda but emphasising the spectator appeal of the major state leagues in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia; the third to 1980 noting the expansion of professional earnings for players, early ground rationalisation and the growth of sponsorships at club and league level; and the fourth in the establishment of a national competition and the striking increases in budgets in a commercial world.
Fascinating glimpses are certainly offered of how the game evolved, an early one being the greater authority wielded by umpires:
The first half of the 1870s saw the power of the umpire expand. The 1872 rules made other significant umpiring changes, apart from mandating that games should have a central umpire as well as two goal umpires. In 1872, the central umpire was given more scope to influence play. In an effort to relieve the game of congestion, he was given the power to throw the ball in the air (a ball up) if scrimmages became too severe. In 1874, the rules were amended giving umpires the final word on rule infringements and the awarding of free marks. The role of captains arguing their case was coming to an end. The umpire’s word was to be final.
A weakness of early histories of Australian football has been their almost total emphasis on the game in Victoria. While there is certainly a bias here towards the foundation colony/state, South Australia and Western Australia (if not Tasmania) get reasonable dues. So too (pleasingly) does coverage of interstate football, and especially the triennial carnivals that were regular features of the football calendar for most of the twentieth century.
Writing of the period just after the First World War, the authors remark on the Australian National Football Council’s aims of expanding the game, ‘pursuing a national agenda throughout the 1920s’, seeing their ‘promotional and propaganda role as vitally important in spreading the Australian football gospel, and to this end using the national carnivals as a way of showcasing the strengths of the native game’. The fact that all states were involved and that the carnivals were held in different cities – Melbourne (1908), Adelaide (1911), Sydney (1914), Perth (1921) and Hobart (1924) – supported that argument while the success of South Australia (1911) and Western Australia (1921) provided extra proof of improved playing standards around the country.
One notable aspect of Australia’s Game is its multi-faceted analysis – geographical, economic, social – and it is the economic that is given attention in discussion of the Coulter Law, introduced in 1930 when match payments had become excessive:
Under the Coulter Law, the payment on offer of any lump sum of money or equivalent ‘to secure a team the services of any player’ was prohibited. It also provided for a ceiling on individual match payments, which the VFL set at £3. This was still a reasonable sum, since the minimum worker wage (or basic wage, as it was called at the time) was just over £4 per week.
There is no doubt that the law was a fair measure, but football clubs aim to win premierships, and if stuffing the socks of star players with extra cash was done too, the authors are under no illusions that the Coulter Law was ‘frequently flouted’ until its abandonment in the 1960s.
The game expanded beyond its suburban roots after the Second World War, but players remained subservient to their clubs even as media coverage widened and sponsors saw opportunities for new markets. Players became more militant in the wake of the 1971 restraint-of-trade case won by New South Wales rugby league player Dennis Tutty in the High Court. Six years earlier football traditions were challenged like never before when Melbourne Football Club captain Ron Barassi changed clubs. What price loyalty? One of the authors (Stewart) was a Melbourne Under 19s premiership player in 1964, and captain and best and fairest player in the same grade the following year, so it might well be he who was disposed to write:
After Melbourne’s 1964 Premiership, Barassi did the unhinkable by moving to Carlton to be that club’s new playing coach. Melbourne fans were devastated. Some of them were so disgusted with this ‘treacherous behaviour’ that they burned Barassi’s number 31 guernsey. The deal that lured Barassi was extraordinarily lucrative and involved coaching and playing at Carlton for three years based on match payments that were far in excess of what he was receiving at Melbourne. His average weekly salary was about five times average weekly earnings and ten times as much as a typical VFL footballer would earn … The Barassi affair jolted officials and fans out of their long-held belief that clubs and players were bound together by lifelong loyalty, and foreshadowed how money would change the game over the next two decades.
The game and its supporting structures have evolved continually throughout its history, but the last 40 years read like a breathless rush: more ground rationalisation; club rationalisation – relocating South Melbourne to Sydney and Fitzroy to Brisbane; fan fightbacks (Footscray); a one-sided struggle for control of the game between the National Football League and the Victorian Football League; the extended VFL morphing into the Australian Football League; money rolling into the game and deep into players’ pockets; racial prejudice and long overdue recognition of and responses to such prejudice; problems of integrity as the game searched for new directions and new markets; the science experiment that went wrong with the Essendon drugs debacle; the explosion of television coverage – when was too much, too much? – and the final acceptance and promotion of women’s football, culminating in a national competition.
Change, of course, brings casualties: the loss of position play, the drop kick and its diminutive form the stab pass; the rarity of the torpedo punt and even the high mark in the modern game, the latter destroyed by the one-armed spoilers; the loss of old clubs – South Melbourne and Fitzroy; the loss of glamour in the surviving state leagues – particularly the SANFL and WAFL; and the loss of interstate football.
It would be churlish to criticise the book for what it leaves out. Just recently a history of the Port Adelaide Football Club has been completed in manuscript form running to 780,000 words (three times the length of Australia’s Game), so the problems facing those who write macro-history are evident. However, a couple of issues are worth addressing: international expansion and the women’s game.
In chapter 17, ‘The Game goes Abroad’, there is discussion of football being played in New Zealand from the 1880s to the 1900s, and in South Africa by gold miners in the 1890s through to the Boer War. A curious omission, however, is any detail of the well-documented 1888 English football tour organised by Nottinghamshire professional cricketers/entrepreneurs Alfred Shaw and Arthur Shrewsbury, which saw the English team play 35 rugby union matches in New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand, and 18 Australian (Victorian) rules matches, principally in Victoria and South Australia. At the end of the tour there was an opportunity to send a team to England for return matches, but the Victorian Football Association failed to act.
Chapter 52, ‘The Rise and Rise of Women’s Football’, rightly recognises the evolution of the women’s game with eight teams taking part in the inaugural Australian Football League Women’s competition in 2017. The AFLW is a remarkable success story but the authors fail to address key questions. Why are the women offered only a truncated pre-season competition? Where/for whom do they play during the winter months? After their brilliant start why aren’t AFLW matches offered as curtain-raisers to AFL games throughout a regular season?
In closing their story, Nicholson, de Moore, Stewart and Hess ask readers to accept a contention that Australian football’s defining feature is its ‘unrivalled capacity to unite Australians’. Yes and no. Yes, we’ll tune in to the AFL grand final in massive numbers. Yes, we from outside Victoria’s borders can believe that those within them have been dragged screaming towards a more ‘Australian’ football outlook.
But tribal/state loyalties remain. If our club is knocked out of the finals race, we’ll support any team but a Victorian side. And how we’d love those state-of-origin games back: when Stephen Kernahan could kick 10 goals on his Carlton teammate Bruce Doull (even in a losing cause), and both SA and WA held an edge over the Vics. Rugby league borrowed the state-of-origin concept from Australian football and, outside of international games, the contests between New South Wales and Queensland are the biggest events in their football year. They should also be a part of ours.
Australia’s Game is a thorough examination of a game many Australians hold dear. It’s a big story, well told.
Matthew Nicholson, Bob Stewart, Greg de Moore and Rob Hess Australia’s Game: The History of Australian Football Hardie Grant 2021 HB 784pp $60.00.
Bernard Whimpress usually writes on sport but his most recent book is a second volume of memoirs, Completion Thing (2021).
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