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Main article: History of Australian rules football
Origins[edit]
Main article: Origins of Australian football
Statue next to the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the approximate site of the 1858 football match between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College. Tom Wills is depicted umpiring behind two young players contesting the ball. The plaque reads that Wills "did more than any other person – as a footballer and umpire, co-writer of the rules and promoter of the game – to develop Australian football during its first decade."
Primitive forms of football were played sporadically in the Australian colonies in the first half of the 19th century. Compared to cricket and horse racing, football was considered a mere "amusement" by colonists at the time, and while little is known about these early one-off games, evidence does not support a causal link with Australian football. In Melbourne, in 1858, in a move that would help to shape Australian football in its formative years, private schools (then termed "public schools" in accordance with nomenclature in England) began organising football games inspired by precedents at English public schools. The earliest match, held on 15 June, was between Melbourne Grammar and St Kilda Grammar.
On 10 July 1858, the Melbourne-based Bell's Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle published a letter by Tom Wills, captain of the Victoria cricket team, calling for the formation of a "foot-ball club" with a "code of laws" to keep cricketers fit during winter. Born in Australia, Wills played a nascent form of rugby football while a pupil at Rugby School in England, and returned to his homeland a star athlete and cricketer. Two weeks later, Wills' friend, cricketer Jerry Bryant, posted an advertisement for a scratch match at the Richmond Paddock adjoining the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). This was the first of several "kickabouts" held that year involving members of the Melbourne Cricket Club, including Wills, Bryant, W. J. Hammersley and J. B. Thompson. Trees were used as goalposts and play typically lasted an entire afternoon. Without an agreed-upon code of laws, some players were guided by rules they had learned in the British Isles, "others by no rules at all". Another milestone in 1858 was a 40-a-side match played under experimental rules between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College, held at the Richmond Paddock. Umpired by Wills and teacher John Macadam, it began on 7 August and continued over two subsequent Saturdays, ending in a draw with each side kicking one goal. It is commemorated with a statue outside the MCG, and the two schools have since competed annually in the Cordner–Eggleston Cup, the world's oldest continuous football competition.
Since the 1920s, it has been suggested that Australian football may have been derived from the Irish sport of Gaelic football. However, there is no archival evidence in favour of a Gaelic influence, and the style of play shared between the two modern codes appeared in Australia long before the Irish game evolved in a similar direction. Another theory, first proposed in 1983, posits that Wills, having grown up among Aboriginals in Victoria, may have seen or played the Aboriginal ball game of Marn Grook, and incorporated some of its features into early Australian football. There is only circumstantial evidence that he knew of the game, and according to biographer Greg de Moore's research, Wills was "almost solely influenced by his experience at Rugby School".
First rules[edit]
Further information: Laws of Australian rules football § Melbourne Rules of 1859
A loosely organised Melbourne side, captained by Wills, played against other football enthusiasts in the winter and spring of 1858. The following year, on 14 May, the Melbourne Football Club was officially established, making it one of the world's oldest football clubs. Three days later, Wills, Hammersley, Thompson and teacher Thomas H. Smith met near the MCG at the Parade Hotel, owned by Bryant, and drafted ten rules: "The Rules of the Melbourne Football Club". These are the laws from which Australian football evolved. The club aimed to create a simple code suited to the hard playing surfaces around Melbourne, and to eliminate the roughest aspects of English school games—such as "hacking" (shin-kicking) in Rugby School football—to reduce the risk of injuries to working men. In another significant departure from English public school football, the Melbourne rules omitted any offside law. "The new code was as much a reaction against the school games as influenced by them", writes Mark Pennings. The rules were distributed throughout the colony; Thompson in particular did much to promote the new code in his capacity as a journalist.
Early competition in Victoria[edit]
See also: List of Australian rules football clubs by date of establishment
Engraving of a football match at the Richmond Paddock, 1866. The MCG and its first pavilion are visible in the background, as are kick-off posts, the forerunner of today's behind posts.
Following Melbourne's lead, Geelong and Melbourne University also formed football clubs in 1859. While many early Victorian teams participated in one-off matches, most had not yet formed clubs for regular competition. A South Yarra club devised its own rules. To ensure the supremacy of the Melbourne rules, the first club-level competition in Australia, the Caledonian Society's Challenge Cup (1861–64), stipulated that only the Melbourne rules were to be used. This law was reinforced by the Athletic Sports Committee (ASC), which ran a variation of the Challenge Cup in 1865–66. With input from other clubs, the rules underwent several minor revisions, establishing a uniform code known as "Victorian rules". In 1866, the "first distinctively Victorian rule", the running bounce, was formalised at a meeting of club delegates chaired by H. C. A. Harrison, an influential pioneer who took up football in 1859 at the invitation of Wills, his cousin.
The game around this time was defensive and low-scoring, played low to the ground in congested rugby-style scrimmages. The typical match was a 20-per-side affair, played with a ball that was roughly spherical, and lasted until a team scored two goals. The shape of the playing field was not standardised; matches often took place in rough, tree-spotted public parks, most notably the Richmond Paddock (Yarra Park), known colloquially as the Melbourne Football Ground. Wills argued that the turf of cricket fields would benefit from being trampled upon by footballers in winter, and, as early as 1859, football was allowed on the MCG. However, cricket authorities frequently prohibited football on their grounds until the 1870s, when they saw an opportunity to capitalise on the sport's growing popularity. Football gradually adapted to an oval-shaped field, and most grounds in Victoria expanded to accommodate the dual purpose—a situation that continues to this day.
Spread to other colonies[edit]
Engraving of the first intercolonial football match between Victoria and South Australia, East Melbourne Cricket Ground, 1879
Football became organised in South Australia in 1860 with the formation of the Adelaide Football Club, the oldest football club in Australia outside Victoria. It devised its own rules, and, along with other Adelaide-based clubs, played a variety of codes until 1876, when they uniformly adopted most of the Victorian rules, with South Australian football pioneer Charles Kingston noting their similarity to "the old Adelaide rules". Similarly, Tasmanian clubs quarrelled over different rules until they adopted a slightly modified version of the Victorian game in 1879. The South Australian Football Association (SAFA), the sport's first governing body, formed on 30 April 1877, firmly establishing Victorian rules as the preferred code in that colony. The Victorian Football Association (VFA) formed the following month.
George Coulthard, one of the first players to attain Australia-wide celebrity
Clubs began touring the colonies in the late 1870s, and in 1879 the first intercolonial match took place in Melbourne between Victoria and South Australia. In 1883, delegates representing the football associations of South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland met to standardise the code across Australia. New rules such as holding the ball led to a "golden era" of fast, long-kicking and high-marking football in the 1880s, a time which also saw players such as George Coulthard achieve superstardom, as well as the rise of professionalism, particularly in Victoria and Western Australia, where the code took hold during a series of gold rushes. Likewise, when New Zealand experienced a gold rush, the sport arrived with a rapid influx of Australian miners. Now known as Australian rules or Australasian rules, the sport became the first football code to develop mass spectator appeal, attracting world record attendances for sports viewing and gaining a reputation as "the people's game".
Australian rules football reached Queensland and New South Wales as early as 1866; the sport experienced a period of dominance in the former, and in the latter, several regions remain strongholds of Australian rules, such as the Riverina. However, by the late 1880s, rugby football had become the dominant code in both colonies, as well as in New Zealand. This shift was largely due to rugby's spread with British migration, regional rivalries and the lack of strong local governing bodies. In the case of Sydney, denial of access to grounds, the influence of university headmasters from Britain who favoured rugby, and the loss of players to other codes inhibited the game's growth.
Emergence of the VFL[edit]
In 1896, delegates from six of the wealthiest VFA clubs—Carlton, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne and South Melbourne—met to discuss the formation of a breakaway professional competition. Later joined by Collingwood and St Kilda, the clubs formed the Victorian Football League (VFL), which held its inaugural season in 1897. The VFL's popularity grew rapidly as it made several innovations, such as instituting a finals system, reducing teams from 20 to 18 players, and introducing the behind as a score. Richmond and University joined the VFL in 1908, and by 1925, with the addition of Hawthorn, Footscray and North Melbourne, it had become the preeminent league in the country and would take a leading role in many aspects of the sport.
Interstate football and the World Wars[edit]
Further information: Interstate matches in Australian rules football and Australian rules football during the World Wars
The first national interstate competition was held in 1908 and included New Zealand.
The time around the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 saw Australian rules undergo a revival in New South Wales, New Zealand and Queensland. In 1903, both the Queensland Australian Football League and the NSW Australian Football Association were established, and in New Zealand, as it moved towards becoming a dominion, leagues were also established in the major cities. This renewed popularity helped encourage the formation of the Australasian Football Council, which in 1908 in Melbourne staged the first national interstate competition, the Jubilee Australasian Football Carnival, with teams representing each state and New Zealand.
The game was also established early on in the new territories. In the new national capital Canberra both soccer and rugby had a head start, but following the first matches in 1911, Australian rules football in the Australian Capital Territory became a major participation sport. By 1981 it had become much neglected and quickly lagged behind the other football codes. Australian rules football in the Northern Territory began shortly after the outbreak of the war in 1916 with the first match in Darwin. The game went on to become the most popular sport in the Territory and build the highest participation rate for the sport nationally.
Australia's first recruitment poster, published in 1915, questions the public's commitment to Australian football rather than the war.
Both World War I and World War II had a devastating effect on Australian football and on Australian sport in general. While scratch matches were played by Australian "diggers" in remote locations around the world, the game lost many of its great players to wartime service. Some clubs and competitions never fully recovered. Between 1914 and 1915, a proposed hybrid code of Australian football and rugby league, the predominant code of football in New South Wales and Queensland, was trialled without success. In Queensland, the state league went into recess for the duration of the war. VFL club University left the league and went into recess due to severe casualties. The West Australian Football League (WAFL) lost two clubs and the SANFL was suspended for one year in 1916 due to heavy club losses. The Anzac Day match, the annual game between Essendon and Collingwood on Anzac Day, is one example of how the war continues to be remembered in the football community.
The role of the Australian National Football Council (ANFC) was primarily to govern the game at a national level and to facilitate interstate representative and club competition. In 1968, the ANFC revived the Championship of Australia, a competition first held in 1888 between the premiers of the VFA and SAFA. Although clubs from other states were at times invited, the final was almost always between the premiers from the two strongest state competitions of the time—South Australia and Victoria—with Adelaide hosting most of the matches at the request of the SAFA/SANFL. The last match took place in 1976, with North Adelaide being the last non-Victorian winner in 1972. Between 1976 and 1987, the ANFC, and later the Australian Football Championships (AFC) ran a night series, which invited clubs and representative sides from around the country to participate in a knock-out tournament parallel to the premiership seasons, which Victorian sides still dominated.
With the lack of international competition, state representative matches were regarded with great importance. Due in part to the VFL poaching talent from other states, Victoria dominated interstate matches for three-quarters of a century. State of Origin rules, introduced in 1977, stipulated that rather than representing the state of their adopted club, players would return to play for the state they were first recruited in. This instantly broke Victoria's stranglehold over state titles and Western Australia and South Australia began to win more of their games against Victoria. Both New South Wales and Tasmania scored surprise victories at home against Victoria in 1990.
Towards a national league[edit]
Hall of Fame Legend Ron Barassi was a leading advocate of a national club-based competition.
The term "Barassi Line", named after VFL star Ron Barassi, was coined by scholar Ian Turner in 1978 to describe the "fictitious geographical barrier" separating the rugby-following parts of New South Wales and Queensland from the rest of the country, where Australian football reigned. It became a reference point for the expansion of Australian football and for establishing a national league.
The way the game was played had changed dramatically due to innovative coaching tactics, with the phasing out of many of the game's kicking styles and the increasing use of handball; while presentation was influenced by television.
The West Coast Eagles and Sydney Swans line up for the national anthem at the 2005 AFL Grand Final.
In 1982, in a move that heralded big changes within the sport, one of the original VFL clubs, South Melbourne, relocated to Sydney and became known as the Sydney Swans. In the late 1980s, due to the poor financial standing of many of the Victorian clubs, and a similar situation existing in Western Australia in the sport, the VFL pursued a more national competition. Two more non-Victorian clubs, West Coast and Brisbane, joined the league in 1987 generating more than $8 million in license revenue for the Victorian clubs and increasing broadcast revenues which helped the Victorian clubs survive. In their early years, the Sydney and Brisbane clubs struggled both on and off-field because the substantial TV revenues they generated by playing on a Sunday went to the VFL. To protect these revenues the VFL granted significant draft concessions and financial aid to keep the expansion clubs competitive.
The VFL changed its name to the Australian Football League (AFL) for the 1990 season, and over the next decade, three non-Victorian clubs gained entry: Adelaide (1991), Fremantle (1995) and the SANFL's Port Adelaide (1997), the only pre-existing club outside Victoria to join the league. In 2011 and 2012, respectively, two new non-Victorian clubs were added to the competition: Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney. The AFL, currently with 18 member clubs, is the sport's elite competition and most powerful body. Following the emergence of the AFL, state leagues were quickly relegated to a second-tier status. The VFA merged with the former VFL reserves competition in 1998, adopting the VFL name. State of Origin also declined in importance, especially after an increasing number of player withdrawals. The AFL turned its focus to the annual International Rules Series against Ireland in 1998 before abolishing State of Origin the following year. State and territorial leagues still contest interstate matches, as do AFL Women players.
In the 2010s, the AFL signalled further attempts at expanding into markets outside Australian football's traditional heartlands by hosting home-and-away matches in New Zealand, followed by China. After several failed bids since the early 1990s for a Tasmania-based AFL team, the Tasmania Football Club secured the 19th AFL license in 2023, and is set to compete by 2028.
