Book Review - A Game of Our Own by Geoffrey Blainey

 A Game of Our Own: the Origins of Australian Football by Geoffrey Blainey

Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003                                              ISBN 1863953477

Well another season of the greatest football code has been run and won, this year by the Brisbane Lions, formerly Fitzroy. It's yet another season in which my team the Carlton Blues have failed to reach the last Saturday in September, the traditional date for the hosting of the Grand Final. While both Fitzroy and Carlton feature in Geoffrey Blainey's history of Australian Rules Football up to 1900, the Grand Final doesn't, as there was no such thing in the first forty-odd years of the code.

In fact there is much about today's game that didn't feature in the early years of what became known as the 'Victorian rules'. For a start the field of play was rectangular rather than oval, there was no handpassing, the game started with a kick-off rather than a bounce, and much of the play was scrummage, rather like Rugby.

That English schoolboy version of football indeed was the precursor to the development of Aussie Rules, as it was a group of cricketers and school masters who got together to adapt the rules that they knew from England to suit an Australian setting. Blainey explains that other ideas of the origin of our game, such as it being derived from Gaelic Football or coming from watching an Aboriginal game, are not supported by any evidence. Gaelic Football was not codified until well after Victoria began playing a distinct style of football, and the similarities that exist between the codes today were not in evidence in the 1800s. Blainey also points out that most of the progenitors of the early game in Melbourne were not Irish, and it seemed to be more popular with the Protestant section of society in the beginning, for lots of social reasons. In fact the first recorded games were between Protestant schools (Blainey explains that the first game was between St. Kilda Grammar and Melbourne Grammar in June 1858, approximately six weeks before the famous "first game of Australian Rules" that was played by Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College in Yarra Park). The links to any Aboriginal form of the game are also tenuous, although Blainey does posit that the distinctive high-marking style of play may have been imported into the game from watching Aboriginals at play in southwestern Victoria.

There are a few things that strike the modern reader and barracker about the history of our game as espoused in this book (the origin of the term barracker is an interesting aside - a Melbourne term, it referred to the military regiments who often played early club football, and the men from the barracks were known for not only their vocal support of their own men, but also disparagement of the opposition). The first is the age of Australian Rules compared to other codes of football. Australians do not often think of things in this country as being old apart from the land itself and Aboriginal culture, yet only Rugby is older as a codified game than Aussie Rules. Of the five oldest major football clubs in the world, three of them are Victorian (Melbourne 1858, Geelong 1859, Notts County 1862, Stoke City 1863, Carlton 1864). The rapidity of the growth in crowds is also notable: Blainey writes "[i]n 1880 in England the final of the FA Cup drew 6,000 people but as many as 15,000 then attended the important matches of the season in Melbourne." In Geelong as much as 10% of the population was turning out to watch games in the 1870s.

The greatest difficulty in trying to understand the early history of Australian Rules is to gather how the game was actually played. There were only ten "laws" of the game when they were first written down, and the newspapers of the day did not expend much print or paper on reporting matches in any great detail. What we do know (and what Blainey describes well), is that the field of play could be up to 500 yards long, often contained trees within the boundaries (trees must have often stood for goalposts), and games could run over several days. It was very much a defensive game of scrummage, with goals hard to come by. It took several decades for the game to open up and become a spectacle of kicking and marking that would look more familiar to modern viewers of the game.

The first games, held in parks, were a free spectacle, but after a time grounds were fenced and admission charged. Money changed the game - players were paid under the table, professional umpires were hired (previously the opposing captains ensured the rules were followed), and some clubs grew strong while others began to wither on the vine.

In 1877 the Victorian Football Association (VFA) was created, with a view to encourage intercolonial games. This met with limited success, as a trip to Ballarat or Bendigo to play the strong and thriving teams there was quite an expense, let alone travelling to Adelaide, Hobart, Sydney or Perth. Blainey suggests that the divide between the Australian Rules States and Rugby League States comes down to a couple of factors: many Victorians moved to South Australia and Western Australia, Hobart always had a strong connexion to Victoria, but Sydney did not, in fact it resented anything Victorian and so spurned the game. Blainey also points out in the case of Sydney the city was much more developed, and so struggled to provide the expanse of turf required to play the Victorian game. Interstate football has had peaks and troughs since the early days, and is now effectively dead in this era of nationwide teams.

Toward the end of Blainey's history, he goes into the creation of the Victorian Football League, the precursor to today's Australian Football League. This breakaway from the VFA, composed mainly of the most financially secure clubs (although Blainey points out that the "selection of the inaugural eight clubs was not completely logical"), the first season of VFL football marked a revolution in the game, inspired in fact by the VFA. To try to stay relevant in the face of the upstart league, the VFA introduced several innovations, such as an eighteen man side, the banishment of "little marks" (the ball now had to travel 10 yards before a mark could be called) and the huge change that kicking behind the goal counted in the score (1 point, versus 6 points for a goal). These major changes presaged the development of the modern game, with fixtures, finals, and that one day in September.

So if you are looking for an interesting and well-written history of the early days of Aussie Rules, I can recommend A Game of Our Own.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell