Putting AFL Cultural Diversity on the Table

Current AFL Players with a Multicultural Background

The table below is taken directly from the AFL's community website. It purports to show the diverse nature of AFL participation. I think it does just the opposite. Leaving aside the utter stupidity of creating two kinds of people: multicutural and (presumably) monocultural, the table indicates to me the paucity of diversity in AFL ranks. 

As a number of correspondents have noted, the table is poorly constructed -- and may even undersell AFL's diversity credentials by failing to pick up some relevant players.

Rather than 'multicultural' the AFL needs to use a different term to cover players whose ancestry is non-Anglo-Saxon, Anglo Celtic, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander (NASACATSI). The difficulty of coming up with accurate terminology is discussed by the Multicultural NSW website.

It is worth noting that some players in the table below are either not NASACATSI or are borderline. 

• Those born in Australian with one parent born in Australia and the other in a commonwealth country or USA
• Those born in Australia with both parents born in an anglophone country 
• Those born overseas to Australian parents

These 47 players I have ruled out because it is just silly to include them. That leaves 47 on the list.

Other players are:

• Those born overseas to non-Australian anglophone parents
• Those born in Australia (or overseas when their parents were playing/working/coaching in the short term) with one parent born in Australia and the other in a non-anglophone country
• Those born in Australia with both parents born in a non-anglophone country 
• Some adult recruits from other sports (these are bolded in red)

These 38 players fall into a category of possibly-to-probably having NASACATSI elements to their background. I have left them as plain text.

The final grouping is those with clear NASACATSI heritage. These I have bolded in blue. These are 14 players out of a total player pool of 811.

Please feel free to challenge and correct any assumption I have made.

Responses 
Much maligned arwon @Arwon has made the point that I had mistakenly given Australian parents to some of the adult OS recruits. This either has been corrected or is in the process of being fixed. He also felt that this should represent its own category. 

		Country of Birth
Player Name		Born overseas	Country	Parent/s born overseas	Mother	Father
Adelaide
Brodie	Smith	No		Yes	England	Scotland
Nathan	Van Berlo	No		Yes	New Zealand	New Zealand
Brisbane
Mitchell	Golby	No		Yes		England
Pearce	Hanley	Yes	England	Yes	Wales	Ireland
Cian	Hanley	Yes	Ireland		Wales	Ireland
Ryan	Harwood	No		Yes	England
Ryan	Lester	No		Yes	England	South Africa
Matthew	Leuenberger	No		Yes		Switzerland
Jordan	Bourke	No		Yes	England
Dayne	Zorko	No		Yes		Yugoslavia
Carlton
Zach	Tuohy	Yes	Ireland	Yes	Ireland	Ireland
Sam	Docherty	No		Yes		Scotland
Ciaran	Byrne	Yes	Ireland	Yes	Ireland	Ireland
Ciaran	Sheehan	Yes	Ireland	Yes	Ireland	Ireland
Matthew	Dick	Yes	Scotland	Yes		Scotland
Collingwood
Tim	Broomhead	No		Yes		England
Mason	Cox	Yes	USA		USA	USA
Nathan	Freeman	No		Yes	Fiji	Fiji
Steele	Sidebottom	No		Yes	England
Marley	Williams	No		Yes		New Zealand
Essendon
David	Zaharakis	No		Yes		Greece
Mark	Baguley	No		Yes	England
James	Gwilt	No		Yes	PNG	Wales
Conor	McKenna	Yes	Ireland
Fremantle
Zachary	Clarke	No		Yes		USA
Sean	Hurley	Yes	Ireland		Ireland	Ireland
Garrick	Ibbotson	No		Yes	England
Chris	Mayne	No		Yes		England
Tendai	Mzungu	No		Yes		Zimbabwe
Alex	Silvagni	No		Yes	India
Hayden	Crozier	No		Yes		Sri Lanka
Anthony	Morabito	No		Yes	Italy
Geelong
Billie	Smedts	No		Yes	England	Holland
Jarrad	Jansen	Yes	NZ	Yes	NZ	NZ
Padraig	Lucey	Yes	Ireland		Ireland	Ireland
Gold Coast
Tom	Nicholls	No		Yes	Fiji
Danny	Stanley	No		Yes	England
Aaron	Hall	No		Yes	Fiji
Daniel	Gorringe	No		Yes	Yugoslavia	England
David	Swallow	No		Yes	Netherlands	England
Nick	Malceski	No		Yes		Macedonia
GWS Giants
Phil	Davis	No		Yes		England
Lachie	Whitfield	No		Yes		England
Rhys	Palmer	No		Yes		Scotland
Stephen	Coniglio	No		Yes	England
Hawthorn
Josh	Gibson	No		Yes		West Indies
David	Hale	No		Yes	Holland
Alex	Woodard	No		Yes	Phillipines
Sam	Mitchell	No		Yes		New Zealand
Paul	Puoplo	No		Yes		Italy
Liam	Shiels	No		Yes		Ireland
Shem-Kalvin	Tatupu	Yes	NZ	Yes	NZ	NZ
Kurt	Heatherly	Yes	NZ	Yes	NZ	NZ
Melbourne
Max	Gawn	No		Yes	New Zealand	New Zealand
Jack	Watts	No		Yes	England	England
Christian	Salem	No		Yes	Lebanon	Lebanon
Heritier (Harry)	O'Brien	Yes	Brazil	Yes	Brazil	Democratic Republic of Congo
Nth Melb
Majak	Daw	Yes	Sudan Khartoum	Yes	South Sudan	South Sudan
Michael	Firrito	No		Yes	Italy	Italy
Andrew	Swallow	No		Yes		England
Eric	Wallace	Yes	USA		USA	USA
Port Adelaide
Alipate	Carlile	Yes	Fiji	Yes	Fiji
Daniel	Flynn	Yes	Ireland	Yes	Ireland	Ireland
Cameron	O'Shea	No		Yes		Ireland
Jasper	Pittard	No		Yes	New Zealand
Paul	Stewart	No		Yes		Scotland
Mason	Shaw	No		Yes	England	Scotland
Oliver	Wines	No		Yes	PNG
Aaron	Young	No		Yes	England	Scotland
Richmond
Jake	Batchelor	No		Yes	Wales
Reece	Conca	No		Yes		Italy
Nick	Vlastuin	No		Yes		PNG
Matthew	McDonough	No		Yes	England
Bachar	Houli	No		Yes	Lebanon	Lebanon
Ivan	Maric	No		Yes	Croatia	Croatia
Shaun	Hampson	No		Yes		England
Matthew	Thomas	No		Yes	Seychelles
St Kilda
Farren	Ray	No		Yes	England
Nick	Riewoldt	No		Yes		Germany
Shane	Savage	Yes	NZ	Yes	Pakeha	Maori
Jason	Holmes	Yes	USA		USA	USA
Cameron	Shenton	No		Yes	England
Sydney
Heath	Grundy	No		Yes	New Zealand
Jarrad	McVeigh	No		Yes		England
Dane	Rampe	No		Yes		Germany
Brandon	Jack	Yes	England	No
Michael	Pyke	Yes	Canada	No	Canada	Canada
Aliir	Aliir	No		Yes	Sudan	Sudan
Zac	Jones	No		Yes	Ireland	Ireland
West Coast
Patrick	Brophy	Yes	Ireland
Jack	Darling	No		Yes		South Africa
Nicholas	Naitanui	No		Yes	Fiji	Fiji
Brant	Colledge	Yes	France	No
Western Bulldogs
Jason	Johannissen	Yes	South Africa	Yes	Zambia	South Africa
Alex	Greenwood	No		Yes	Phillipines
Lin	Jong	No		Yes	Taiwan	East Timor
Nathan	Hrovat	No		Yes		Croatia
Daniel	Pearce	Yes	New Zealand	Yes	Holland	New Zealand
Tom	Boyd	No		Yes	Denmark	Australian

Mysterious Melbourne Match

About 12 seconds of Melbourne soccer footage I found somewhere. No idea where or when the game is being played. Help!

Victorian Soccer Fixtures and Results 1890

The teams in 1890 were

• South Melbourne
• Carlton
• Rovers
• Wanderers

Saturday 12 April

Players 3 Spectators 1 at Middle Park

Saturday 10 May

Rovers v Carlton at Middle Park

Rovers: Newton, Hill. T. Clarke, Boden, Law, Plummer, Muirhead, Clarke, Bisiker, Lamb, Middleton.

Carlton: Liddiard, Tunnicliff, Irvine, M'Kenzie, F. Beeson, H. Beeson, Bathgate, Nicholson. 

Saturday 31 May

Carlton v. Wanderers (George and George Cup) at Middle Park.

Carlton: Wilson, Spence, Amson, Tunnicliff, Donaldson, Beeson (2), Bathgate, Nicholson, M'Kenzie, Purnell and Irvine.

Rovers v South Melbourne at Middle Park

Rovers: W. Newton; T. Hill. T. H. Clarke, F. Bodes, R. Law, Middleton, Plummer, F. Ross, D.Lamb, W Bisiker, E. Springall. 

South Melbourne: M'Gregor, Grove, Princep, Armour, Hartley, Johnstone, Caven, Bowdler, M'Pherson, Ross, Salmon, Spence, Gibson and Mann.

Saturday 7 June

Rovers 3 v South Melbourne 2

Melbourne Rovers: Tipper, Law, Clarke, Hill, Boden, Springall, Princeps, Bisiker, Bowland, Wivell, Clarke,

South Melbourne: M'Gregor, Ross. Macpherson, Grooves, Spence, Johnstone, Mann, Hartley, Bowdler, Caven. Balmore, Gibson, Armour,

Referee— M'Kenzie.

Saturday 21 June

South Melbourne v Wanderers (George and George Cup) at rear of E.M.C.G. 

Saturday 5 July 

South Melbourne 4 Carlton 0 (George and George Cup) at Middle Park 

Saturday 12 July

Wanderers v Rovers (George and George's cup) at Middle Park

Wanderers: Goal, Wolfe; Backs, Boase, Millar; half backs. Maxwell, Thomas. Heape; forwards. Maxwell, M'Donald. Fraser, Thomas, Henderson; emergencies. Stenton. Thomas, Isherwood. 

Rovers: Goal, Peters: backs, Hill, Clarke: half backs, Clarke, Law, Tipper; forwards, Prinseps, Wivell, Poland, Bisiker, Springall ; emergencies, Poland, Plummer, Middleton.

South Melbourne v Carlton

South Melbourne: M'Gregor. M'Pherson, Ridgeway, Salmon, Tunnicliffe, Spence, Ross, Johnstone, Paton, Hartley and Mann. 

Carlton: Wilson, Spence, Amson, Donaldson, Holmes. Nicholson, Bathgate, Beeeson, M'Kenzie, Parnell and Irvine.

Saturday 26 July

South Melbourne 3 Rovers 1 (George and George Cup) at Middle Park

Saturday 9 August

Carlton 3 South Melbourne 0 (George and George Cup) at Middle Park

Wanderers 6 Rovers 1 (George and George Cup) at Middle Park

Saturday 6 September

South Melbourne 5 Carlton 5 (Beaney Cup) at Middle Park

Carlton: Goal, Wilson; backs, Spence and Hunt; half backs, Donaldson, F. Beeson and Walker ; forwards, Bathgate. H. Beeson, M'Kenzie Nicholson and Irvine. 

South Melbourne: Goal, Salmon. backs, M'Pherson and Wridgway; half backs, Paton, Tunnicliff and Ross: forwards, Mann, Hartley, Johnston, Murray and Gibb.

Saturday 13 September

South Melbourne v Carlton (Beaney Cup) at Middle Park 

Multicultural Round, or "Spot the Wog"

This article appeared first in the Age as "A multicultural AFL? Not quite" 13 July 2013. A year on and it was just as fresh.  I tweak it on and off as the AFLdiversity site releases its new figures. The latests figures suggest the game is becoming even more monocultural. 

Someone needs to call the AFL out on this one. As if we don’t have enough ‘noble work’ rounds already, we are this week lumbered with the most ludicrously framed of them all, Multicultural Round. The only round more silly would be the one that celebrated the game’s great Barrys.

Now I’m not against the idea of celebrating cultural diversity in any arena. More power to those who want to remind us that we live in a diverse and multicultural society. Yet, no matter how many celebrations of Anzac, Aboriginality, women's round, heritage round, whatever round, a great number of the game's supporters seem entirely opposed to these ideas. The booing of Adam Goodes is only the surface of the intolerance that seems to flow through Australian rules football. Ultimately the game is xenophobic. Moreover, that fear of the outsider is something of which it is perversely proud.

If this were not the case and anyone in the AFL bothered to think deeply for even a moment about the motivations of the Multicultural Round they would run a mile.

Are these the face of multicultural AFL footy:
a Wallaby and a bloke they don't understand?

Unfortunately, the AFL does not have all that much to celebrate in terms of its cultural diversity – yet. While the AFL Diversity website claims that “Australian football has the extraordinary power to bring people together regardless of their background,” the proof of the pudding is just not there. For example, the AFL concedes that of the 811 listed AFL players, only 24 were born overseas (9 to Australian parents), just 3 per cent. This can be compared with the general Australian population in which over 27 per cent were born overseas. (The AFL claims this figure is only 20 per cent.)

Perhaps it could be argued that AFL figures are not representative of the game of Australian rules as a whole. This may be the case but would then be an indictment of the development pathways available for the non-Australian born. Moreover, footy has had many years to integrate the overseas born as elite players and has failed to do so. It's not as if substantial numbers of migrants have only just recently popped up on our shores. Since 1970 the non-Australian born have represented over 20 per cent of the Australian population. The lowest figure since 1890 is about 10 per cent in the immediate post-Second-World-war years.

The AFL claims a higher figure in relation to those of a “Multicultural background”. About 12% (down from 14% in 2014 and 15% in 2013) of listed players fit the AFL’s Multicultural criteria of having at least one parent born overseas. So the AFL falls down here as well, with over 45 per cent of the Australian population fitting this criterion. In 2016 A total of 113 players (14%) were from a multicultural background (i.e. having at least one parent born overseas) and 20 players (2.5%) were born overseas among those listed in the AFL in 2016." [I will rewrite this section once the 2017 figures come out.]

When we look more closely at the AFL's figures, further problems appear. The AFL Diversity website lists 99 'Multicultural players (down from 112 in 2014, 121 in 2013 and 118 in 2012), carefully noting their parents' country of origin. Of the 99, over one-half have one parent from Anglophone countries, mainly Britain, Ireland and New Zealand. The evidence suggests that only 7 of the 811 listed players are from non-Anglophone families. Steele Sidebottom, born in Australia to an Australian father and English mother does not strike me as a significant embodiment of cultural diversity. And the idea that Heath Grundy’s Kiwi mother makes him somehow ‘multicultural’ borders on the perverse. From the list of past multicultural players: Dermot Brereton? The man so sensitive to diversity that he told Adam Goodes to HTFU. Really?

Bizarrely, this definition would allow most of the game’s Anglo-Australian founders to be described as Multicultural and eligible for selection in the all-time Multicultural Australian rules team.

Yet this construction of multicultural identity is not universally applied in the AFL’s thinking. Fourth generation Australian Ron Barrasi is included in an historical list of Multicultural players. There’s a tokenism here that cares more about the woggy surname than it does about the realities and differences of Italian-Australian culture. It’s all just a bit silly.

Actually it isn’t just silly. It’s also pernicious. The problem with all of this lies in the construction of a ‘Multicultural’ identity as opposed to another (true blue?) identity. The diversity gurus at the AFL seem to think that in breaking Australian society into two categories (insiders and outsiders, native-born and migrants, or Australians and multiculturals?) they are doing us a favour when in fact they are replicating the kind of Hansonite stereotypes that gave us Cronulla. When Eddie McGuire makes stupid comments about the “Felafel Land” of Western Sydney or Kevin Sheedy reveals his ignorance in talking about the immigration department supplying supporters for the Western Sydney Wanderers, they articulate the AFL’s failure to understand the social fissures encouraged by this false division between ‘real’ and ‘wannabee’ Aussies.

The bottom line is that in a multicultural society we are ALL multicultural. We all have ethnic and cultural baggage that sets us up in relation to the fluid process that we call multicultural Australia. We are all in it together and none of the imported cultures deserve the priority that is the privilege of the truly indigenous.

The AFL is to be congratulated for recognising and using its great social clout for good in relation to any number of issues. The way the AFL has supported indigenous players in their struggle to be recognised as powerful and legitimate contributors to the game is one of our great sport stories of recent times. It should also be supported for acknowledging that it is not a particularly diverse sport and taking steps to correct that.

But I’ll be buggered if I am going to pat them on the back for playing catch-up football in relation to the vital issue of cultural diversity. Let me know when the siren sounds on this game because I reckon we have a while to go. Meanwhile I’m off to a game this weekend that, for all its faults - and despite the FFA's attempts to limit the appearance and reality of diversity - is so culturally diverse that to play “Spot the Wog” would be redundant. I’ll leave that to the AFL.

Next goal the winner

Village football in Ayrshire, 1947 to the 1960s

Roy Hay

Our family moved to the tiny little village of Straiton, in Carrick, the southern third of the county of Ayrshire in Scotland in 1947. It lies on the fault line dividing the central lowlands from the southern highlands. My father was the headmaster of the local primary school which had a roll which varied from around fifty to just under a hundred. Numbers could be affected significantly by the arrival or departure of a large family at one of the farms in the area. At times my sister and I and one other boy were the only pupils who lived in the village itself, the rest came from the surrounding countryside. The school seldom, if ever, played football matches against other schools because there were too few pupils at any age group to field an eleven. There were only 5 boys in my class year for most of my primary education.

Straiton Primary School. The boys in my class included Ian McWhirter and Peter McMillan (back row, extreme left pair), John McWee and Michael Heaney (second row extreme left). I am on the right in the third row.

The pupils played football on the asphalt area around the school, which had a shed with a roof and two upright supports which provided one goal and a couple of dustbins or a pile of jackets would suffice at the other end. Playground ‘fitba’ rules applied.[1] Games would start before school in the morning and continue through mid-morning, lunch and afternoon breaks. After school and at weekends I would spend hours kicking and heading a ball against a blank wall at the back of the school, one of real perks of living in the schoolhouse.

Straiton Primary School. The football playing area is across the foreground. The blank wall of the main school building, the white harled one on the left, faces the other school classrooms, while the school house is on the right beyond the flagpole.

The village never had a formal football team, as far as I know, unlike the slightly larger villages of Crosshill and Kirkmichael which were about four miles away to the west and north respectively. Their teams played in the south Ayrshire amateur leagues. Maybole was larger still, around 4–4,500 people. Maybole Juniors played in the semi-professional lower tier Ayrshire leagues. Junior football in Scotland is not a youth competition, but an open age competition below what is called senior football. Talented young players in the senior ranks are often farmed out to junior clubs to toughen up, while senior players on the way down may spend some seasons in the junior ranks at the end of their careers. It makes for a very physical and competitive environment. It would be somewhat similar to the relationship between the VFA and the VFL in Australian football in the old days. Ayr United and Kilmarnock represented the county of Ayrshire at the professional senior level of Scottish football. None of my generation from the village went on to play football at senior level in Scotland.

Later at secondary school, Carrick Academy, we would play before getting on the bus in the morning, before school started, at most playtimes and lunch breaks. Playground fitba rules applied here too. In one notorious period of about eight weeks one or other of our number broke a window of the school during our kickabouts in the playground, but since I was number eight on the list and the headmaster had had enough, I remember being the one who was belted for the misdemeanor. Not only that but the headmaster told my father and I was on the end of another licking when I got home.

No football was played in the winter evenings because it was dark between four and five pm by the time we got home from school. On Saturday mornings some of the older boys from the villages might turn out for their secondary school team, as I did, but that was in Maybole, seven miles away. In the afternoon, those who were interested would travel by bus, bicycle, minibus or rarely by car to Somerset Park in the county town of Ayr to support ‘the Honest Men’ of Ayr United.

In the summer it was very different. Between 5 and 7 pm a small knot of youngsters would be found around one of the goals in the village football field playing with a dilapidated leather ball. The game would probably be ‘three-and-in’ to start with. One lad was in goals, and the rest played as individuals trying to score, and when you got three you swapped with the keeper. Soon the numbers would grow, eventually sides would be picked and jackets might be deposited about the half way line to form a second goal. Gradually the whole field would be brought into use. By 10 pm there might be upwards of 50 players, roughly, very roughly, divided into two halves, though two less competent or younger players might be balanced by a talented or older one. Late arrivals would join in on the same principles.

Straiton football field under water during a flood of the River Girvan. It was not usually this wet when we played in summer.

Offside would be variable, there being no referee most of the time, and only the most blatant ‘poaching’ would be sanctioned. If you were goal sneaking (Australian term) or poaching (Scottish term) then your goal would not count, but if you ran through on a pass from deep you would be allowed to proceed as long as there was a defender in the rough vicinity. So that and most other decisions were by rough consensus with a little bit of the Greek principle (might is right) thrown in if things got heated. Positional play and passing was also variable, possession of the ball and dribbling much more common and clumps of players around the ball also.

Free kicks were limited. You were expected to look after yourself and being kicked on the shins or up in the air with a sliding tackle was ‘all part of the game’. Rules changed in the gloaming. As it grew too dark to see, around 11 pm in high summer, the cry would go up, ‘Next goal the winner’ even though the score might be 23-12 at the time, if you happened to have been counting since some point in the past, resulting in a frantic scramble to bring the game to a conclusion.

Very occasionally a professional footballer would turn up as a friend of one of the participants and join in, risking his livelihood in the mayhem of bodies. So Peter Price, Ayr United’s star centre-forward, who later played in Australia scoring a hat-trick in his first game for Gladesville-Ryde against Hakoah in 1963 in the Sydney First Division, also had a kick-about with us in Straiton long before that.[2]

Yet there was one game of football played near the village that received international exposure. It was the centerpiece of one of the most awful films ever made, entitled The Match. Made in 1999 and despite a star cast including Ian Holm, Isla Blair, Richard E. Grant and Neil Morrissey, with cameos by Pierce Brosnan and Alan Shearer, it clunks along as Scottish whimsy gone wrong. The conceit is that the local pub and an upmarket bistro have played an annual football match 99 times with the pub going down each time. Now the 100th iteration is to be the decider (‘next goal the winner’), only the loser is to voluntarily close down. Shot in and around the village, the talented cast make as much as they can from a pretty leaden love and football story. Gregory’s Girl or Local Hero it is not. There is a review in Variety, which does its absolute best to pump up the tyres, but that is a struggle.[3] The locals did not do well out of the film either and I think some of them are still owed money.

Black Bull Hotel, Straiton. Benny’s Bar in The Match.

The actual match is not played on the football field in the village but in an expanse of roughly flat land on Genoch farm south of it by about a couple of miles. This is a more photogenic location and quite appropriate in a way since the local farms were loci of a range of sports even in the post-war years. Each farm had its own particular sport—badminton, china or lawn bowls, tennis, even croquet. The farmers and some of the villagers, like the Hays, ‘neighboured’, as it was called. That is they would band together for the labour intensive elements in the annual farming calendar, harvesting, shearing sheep, lifting potatoes and turnips and so on. After the day’s ‘darg’ (work) was done a pig or a sheep might have been killed to provide food for all and in the evening after supper everyone would take part in the farm’s game.

Nevertheless, football was the most central game to the local sporting year, only rivaled by badminton in the village hall over the winter evenings. Football provided a topic of conversation and an ice breaker even for the majority of the population whose only contact with the game might be doing the football pools or listening to a game on the radio. Television was only just reaching the village in the 1960s and reception was very poor. My future wife remembers coming to the school house and seeing the family huddled round a black and white television whose signal came from Northern Ireland at times, only 30 miles away to the south-west. The story was that the BBC and Scottish television shot the football matches ‘using a box brownie with a sock over the lens’, such was the poor quality of the vision. It looked on the screen as if a snowstorm was occurring as the figures fluttered around. The green and pink evening sports papers, the Citizen and the Evening Times, could be picked up in Ayr on a Saturday night, while Sunday Post and daily papers carried pages of match reports and football gossip. None of them ever had anything to say about football in Straiton.

Yet, football was part of the shared culture, not always overt or demonstrative, but always there. International and big club games were always anticipated and picked over in the aftermath. A group of the young men, and a very occasional woman, would organise a trip to Glasgow for an international match or a Cup final. A few older men would be regulars at Somerset Park. My Latin teacher at Carrick Academy for all but the first two years had a fatal flaw—his support for Ayr United. He could be sidetracked into discussions about the game whereas his predecessor taught with a strap to hand to sting the palms of those whose declensions and conjugations left something to be desired.

I doubt if my own family’s involvement in the game had much influence on me at the time. That came much later. My father would very occasionally join in the games in the playground and he did not talk about his own truncated career. My grandfather’s exploits at club and international level must have been a topic of conversation with members of the extended family and occasional visitors but that had little impact when I was young. As the oldest male of the next generation some of the family memorabilia and news cuttings came to me but I stored them away for the future. It was not till 2004 that I began to put together his story and that came about as I was trying to find a way to help shape my mother-in-law’s autobiography which my wife and I were editing for her 90th birthday. Realising I had this cache of material I thought it might help if I put it to use as a dry run for the other book.

Growing up in south Ayrshire, even in an area which had no claims to football success, it was inconceivable to us that this game had not been around since time immemorial and that we had invented and owned it.[4]

---

[1]               One version can be found on the Sports and Editorial Services Australia website at: http://sesasport.com/?p=2508

[2]               Soccer News (Victoria), 25 April, 1963, p. 5.

[3]               Derek Elley, review of The Match, Variety, 9 August 1999, http://variety.com/1999/film/reviews/the-match-1200458758/

[4]               Mining villages on the Ayrshire coalfield like Annbank and Glenbuck produced barrowloads of football stars.

From Detente to Distrust

These are the first two pages of my latest piece in the The International Journal of the History of Sport. Copyright prevents me sharing any more than the taster below. The whole article can be accessed via http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/78xGajXpH92ajHjdDciD/full.

Soccer’s Place in Post-World War I Melbourne

There are four main football codes in Australia. While each has a presence in each state,
Rugby League dominates in the more heavily populated Northern states of the eastern
seaboard, and Australian rules is the main code in the rest of the nation, with its origins and
historical epicentre in Melbourne.1 Rugby union is presently in League’s shadow in the
northern states (though with strong spectator interest generated by international games and
some interest, mostly at the private school level, in the Australian rules states). Association
football (soccer) has the broadest national coverage and the highest participation figures.
While soccer has some local strongholds, it is almost universally the second football code
in each state in terms of revenue and interest. Since 1880, this patchwork has been ever
changing. Its seams and tears are indices of the conflict between and within codes for much
of the games’ histories in Australia.

Yet antagonism has not always been the modus operandi in Australian football. In the
early days of codification, advocates of the football codes often saw themselves as
engaging in the one great game of football, sometimes describing it as the ‘English game
of football’ whether playing rugby, Victorian, Association or any other variation or
confusion of rules. Code delineation, competition and jealousy tend to accompany the
heightening of professionalism and the competition for enclosed grounds – as do the
search for and mythologization of origins.

In much of Australia before the 1890s, football code co-operation was common.
A Townsville Football Association, for example, was founded along these truly plural
lines:

A football association and two clubs have been formed during the week, one under the title of the Townsville and the other the Mercantile . . . It has been resolved that the association should include clubs playing under any recognised rules of football.

The short-lived Rugby and English Association Football Club of Perth, established in
1892, is a co-operative formation almost unimaginable today. Certainly, aficionados
argued for the merits of their own code but a sense of fraternity was often obtained
between them. In Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere, much experimentation and codeswitching
occurred as clubs tried to establish their choice of code.

As late as 1909, J.J. Calvert, President of the Sydney Rugby Union was happy to speak
effusively about soccer. Richard Kreider describes his speech at a dinner to welcome the
West Australian ‘Soccerites’ to Sydney. Calvert proudly claimed to be the oldest soccer
player in the room, having played a version of the game at Oxford University.

Calvert then confessed that had soccer been the prominent game in NSW when he first began to take an interest in football administration, his services could well have been devoted to his first love . . . and although he believed that no game could possibly outshine rugby, he looked upon football as a grand and legitimate game and wished for the West Australian team to convince the public that British Association football was well worth seeing.

This contrasts markedly with the miserable reception the West Australian team received in
Melbourne.

Only in Melbourne

Perhaps only in Melbourne does a brooding, hidebound and monolithic structure of feeling
dominate, where other codes are sometimes humoured and usually dismissed as inferior.
Yet even this attitude was softened from time to time. Melbourne’s press was sometimes
faintly supportive of soccer after a few initial warning shots in the early 1880s. In the
period immediately following the First World War, the press and the Victorian Football
League (VFL) seemed to take a positive attitude to soccer, a game which had contributed
so much to the war effort that it and its players were impossible to forget so quickly. Too
many soccer players had appeared in Rolls of Honour for their efforts to be dismissed as
marginal. It appears that in 1920 soccer belonged as a small but significant component of
Melbourne sporting culture.

While soccer’s contribution to the ANZAC story has been largely forgotten today, it
was hard to escape in the immediate post-war period. Even as late as 1927, a suburban
soccer match memorializing ANZAC was being promoted by the press. In 1920, the very
strong Northumberland and Durhams club were ‘popularly known as the “all-digger”
team.’ And during and after the war many soldiers previously unaware of the game had
been exposed to it, often with transformative effects.

What follows is a series of moments and case studies that trace a changing attitude
towards soccer in Melbourne and the rebuilding of the ideology oft-noted by Roy Hay, that
soccer is a ‘wicked foreign game’. It is a selective narrative because at this point it
remains in the service of a hypothesis.

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