A Game of Our Own: The Origins of Australian Football

by Geoffrey Blainey

Today Australian Rules football is a multi - million - dollar business' with superstar players' high - profile presidents and enough scandals to fill a soap opera. The game has changed beyond recognition - or has it? In A Game of Our Own' esteemed historian Geoffrey Blainey documents the birth of our great national game. Who were the characters and champions of the early days of Australian football? How was the VFL formed? Why was the umpire's job so difficult? Blainey takes a sceptical look at the idea that the game had its origins in Ireland or in Aboriginal pastimes. Instead he demonstrates that footy was a series of inventions. The game played in 1880 was very different to that of 1860' just as the game played today is different again. Journey back to an era when the ground was not oval' when captains acted as umpires' when players wore caps and jerseys bearing forgotten colours and kicked a round ball that soon lost its shape. A Game of Our Own is a fascinating social history and a compulsory read for all true fans of the game.

Genres: History, Sports, Nonfiction

249 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Geoffrey Blainey, one of Australia's most eminent historians, was appointed the foundation Chancellor of the University of Ballarat (UB) in 1993 after an illustrious career at the University of Melbourne. He was installed as UB Chancellor in December 1994 and continued until 1998. The Blainey Auditorium at the Mt Helen Campus of UB is named in his honour. Blainey, always a keen exponent of libraries and the acquisition of books, has donated part of his extensive book collection to the UB library. In 2002 the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred on Blainey in recognition of his contribution to the University of Ballarat and to the community in general.

Educated at Ballarat High School, Blainey won a scholarship to Wesley College, before attending Melbourne University where he studied history. He worked as a freelance historical author writing mainly business histories such as The Peaks of Lyall; Gold and Paper; a History of the National Bank of Australasia; and Mines in the Spinifex. Blainey accepted a position at the University of Melbourne in 1962 in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce. He held the positions of Professor of Economic History (1968-77); Senior Lecturer 1962; and from 1977-1988 he occupied the Ernest Scott Chair of History at Melbourne University. Professor Blainey also held the chair of Australian studies at Harvard University.

As an economic historian, Blainey challenged the conventional view, questioning accepted contemporary understandings of European settlement of Australia as a convict nation, Aboriginal land rights, and Asian immigration. He is described as a 'courageous public intellectual, a writer with rare grace and a master storyteller'. In a reassessment of the life of Blainey, 'The Fuss that Never Ended' considers his ideas, his role in Australian history, politics and public life, and the controversies that surrounded him.

He was always popular with students. According to the Melbourne University home page 'When Geoffrey Blainey spoke to final-year students in the Friends of the Baillieu Library HSC Lectures in the 1970s, the Public Lecture Theatre was packed to capacity and his audience carried copies of his books to be signed, a tribute to what Geoffrey Bolton characterised as his "skills in interpreting technological change in admirably lucid narratives that appealed to both specialist and non-specialist audiences".

Among his most popular works are the 'The Rush that Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining'; 'The Tyranny of Distance'; 'A Shorter History of Australia'; 'A Short History of the World'; and 'The Origins of Australian Football'.

In 2000 Professor Blainey was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia for service to academia, research and scholarship, and as a leader of public debate at the forefront of fundamental social and economic issues confronting the wider community. At that time the University's Vice-Chancellor Professor Kerry Cox said 'Geoffrey Blainey guided the new and inexperienced university through its first four years with a benevolent but firm hand. This time was challenging as the university strove to make a place for itself in higher education, grappled with funding cuts and the eventual merger with neighbouring TAFE institutes. For those at the university fortunate enough to work with Geoffrey Blainey during his time as Chancellor, they witnessed first hand his humility, and we are proud of his role in our history.'

In 2002 the degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred on Professor Blainey in recognition of his contribution to the University of Ballarat and the community in general. The same year Blainey donated a collection of material to the University of Ballarat. Included in this collection are historical books, papers and other material relating to the early history of mining and the central Victorian goldfields. A second generous donation of material was received in 2005. 'The Geoffrey Blainey Mining Collection' is l

Reviews

[Roger · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/

[Oliver Hodson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this one was well researched and had some valuable insights into the development of the game. It is precariously tight in terms of its picture of the origins of the game- sketching a few key people and the first rules. It also answers a few questions like the relationship with the gaelic game (a definitive not influential) and other forebears (the book says that the game was more like rugby and early soccer but went it’s own way quickly). These arguments are well defined and well proven.
It may be unfair to ask for the author to take on a bigger brief that they want but I would have liked to hear more about handball and how that developed, and also considering that there was talk about offside in the game, when did it come out?
I would have also liked to hear more about the tactics changing and seeing as the round oval replaced the rectangle and the oval ball replaced the spherical, more on when these things became the standard- probably stretching into the beginnings of the VFA and VFL competitions. I guess it comes to your conception of when the origins stops and when the game becomes something else.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for anyone who loves history and Australian Rules Football and I qualify on both counts. Professor Geffrey Blainey, who was Prof of History at Melbourne is an Aussie Rules fan and has created a superb book about the game he loves which also tells a great deal about early Melbourne and the history of the period. I found his account of the open parklands of early Melbourne when football fans walked across the open fields to a football match at the South Yarra ground to be particularly interesting and his methodical analysis of the derivation of the game discounts the theory that it came from aboriginal sources. A very interesting read.

[Angus Mcfarlane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have enjoyed some of Blainey’s history over the years and finding this one seemed like a good opportunity to dig into the origins of Australian Rules Football. Blainey argues for the view that AFL evolved independently in Melbourne from the seedbed of the emerging school footballs in England which were adopted and adapted as migrants came to Australia. The early versions were low scoring and sounded pretty boring to watch, particularly when games continued until dark prevented further play. It was also pretty violent and umpires had little ability to manage this, a challenge that was to become greater as umpires influence was formally de-prioritised relative to players (e.g. no sending off).
Perhaps the most controversial element of the book is Blainey’s assertion that Australia’s aboriginal people did not invent or have much to do with the development of AFL. Blainey takes a number of lines of evidence for this, as he does for negating the proposition that Gaelic football was the pre-cursor for AFL. Blainey’s argument is not one which will be heard against the popularity of the idea. The fact that Australian indigenous players bring so much to the modern game tends to reinforce this view. It would be interesting to know what the counter-argument to Blainey’s is.
I thought the book would extend further into the modern era, but it only covers the period between ~1860 and 1890, by which time the rules and form of the game were largely established and distinctive enough to remain so until now. Enough coverage to convince me that it is indeed Australia’s home-grown football.

[Michael Kerjman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting and informative book on an Australian futbol history, both contextually and visually.

[Mark Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise but thorough examination of the early days of Australian Rules.
Examines some of the myths

[Rich · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a shame that the book on Aussie rules was written by one of Australia's most reactionary historians... within a few pages of the preface he manages to called Aboriginal footballers "one of the ornaments of the game". YUCK. But it's a fascinating history and imma read about it!