Publication details of all texts to which reference is made in this essay can be found in the bibliography.
Almost uniquely among major sports, Australian football has a geographically fragmented history, which is reflected in the comparative dearth of works about it that are written from a genuinely national perspective. Even volumes with ostensibly generalist briefs tend typically either to approach their subject on a state by state basis or to treat 'Australian football' as being synonymous with the VFL or AFL. Examples of the former approach include Robert Pascoe's over-ambitiously titled The Winter Game: the Complete History of Australian Football, which is essentially a detailed chronological narrative about the history of football in Victoria with a series of elongated - and usually superficial, simplistic and flawed - footnotes about the development of the game in the other southern states, Jim Main's Australian Rules Football: an Illustrated History, which devotes no fewer than twelve chapters to the VFL and just one each to football in South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, and The Complete Guide to Australian Football by Ken Piesse, which affords a fairly thorough A-Z coverage of VFL/AFL football including formulaic treatments of the contributions made to that competition, and that competition only, by players from other states.
The best example of the latter approach would probably be the AFL's centenary publication, 100 Years of Australian Football, edited by John Ross, which is not really about Australian football in a general sense at all, but merely about its VFL/AFL manifestation. Interstate football is afforded brief treatment, but only from the perspective of the VFL, while descriptions of attempts to popularise the game in the eastern states manage quite comprehensively to ignore the fact that much of the most effective work was carried out by South Australians, Western Australians and Tasmanians for whom it is undoubtedly fair to observe that the nationalist agenda, almost invariably, has loomed somewhat larger than for most Victorians.
The quintessential text about the early development of Australian football remains Geoffrey Blainey's A Game of Our Own: the Origins of Australian Football. Thorough and engaging as this text is, however, its overall impact is undermined by a feeling that its author is more concerned with promoting a personal view as to the game's early origins than with undertaking an objective, impartial analysis of those origins. In other words, it is more a work of propaganda than investigation.
Good generalist works about the VFL/AFL abound. Perhaps the most enlightened treatment of the sociocultural impact of the sport remains Leonie Sandercock's and Ian Turner's Up Where, Cazaly?, while Kevin Taylor's annual and, until its final couple of manifestations, self-published Footystats series provided, between 1995 and 2000, unsurpassed statistical background. In recent years the AFL's self-published season preview volumes (AFL '97 et al) have impressively supplemented the increasingly sophisticated statistical underpinning which the game now boasts, albeit that they, perhaps unwittingly, tend to reinforce the twin myths, first, of Australian football's essential 'Victorianness' and, secondly, that the old VFL competition is the direct and sole antecedent of the modern day AFL and that therefore the histories and records of the two competitions can be directly equated and viewed as seamlessly intertwined.
Stephen Rodgers' Every Game Ever Played: VFL/AFL Results 1897-1991, together with subsequent editions, provides line scores from every VFL/AFL match ever played as well as summaries, in digest form, of the main events of each season, while The Complete Book of VFL Finals by Graeme Atkinson highlights the 'business end' of each season with admirable thoroughness. Also worthy of attention is Russell Holmesby's and Jim Main's This Football Century, which lucidly and fairly comprehensively recounts the key benchmarks in both VFL and AFL history in a straightforward, chronological manner.
Football in South Australia has not been subjected to a comprehensive overview since Bernard Whimpress' excellent The South Australian Football Story, and is well overdue to be re-evaluated, particularly in the wake of the Adelaide Crows' emergence as one of the power clubs of the AFL, and Port Adelaide's perennial SANFL dominance turned national pre-occupation and nascent success. SA Greats: the History of the Magarey Medal by the late John Wood is one of the finest anecdotal accounts of Australian football history yet produced. It admirably exposes its author's ability to capture the flavour of a moment or a time by going beyond a mere narrative treatment of its subject. Of all Wood's football books, this is by some measure the most varied and engrossing.
The best statistical
survey of South Australian football remains The Complete Book of SANFL
Records by Dion Hayman, initially published in 1990 and, again, albeit
privately, fourteen years later.
A re-appraisal of the
history of football in the
Perhaps the biggest boom region for Australian football over the past couple of decades has been the Northern Territory. NTFL (Northern Territory Football League): a History of Australian Football in Darwin and the Northern Territory from 1916 to 1995 by David Lee and Michael Barfoot outlines some of the developments which created the boom, as well as dealing with the history of the sport in Darwin since its origins there during the first World War.
The old Victorian Football Association which, having briefly metamorphosed into a 'poor man's' version of the VFL and now, it would seem, having gone some way along the route towards transformation into something infinitely stranger and more artificial, has been the subject of just one attempt at a comprehensive historical treatment in the shape of Marc Fiddian's 1977 volume The Pioneers: 100 Years of Association Football. Since that time there has been nothing of a comparable nature produced, although the same author's The Roar of the Crowd: a History of VFA Grand Finals does occasionally go beyond the literal confines of its title to provide enough general background to enable the reader to construct at least a skeletal impression of the competition's development and impact.
Tasmanian football has been paid similarly scant attention since Ken Pinchin's A Century of Tasmanian Football 1879-1979 which is nevertheless, for the most part, a highly authoritative and detailed work which rewards close attention.
Generalist works about Western Australian football have also fallen into abeyance with the last - and best - being Geoff Christian's The Footballers. It seems the participation of clubs from Western Australia and South Australia in the AFL, perhaps coupled with the demise of state of origin football, has undermined the perceived need to evaluate the sport from a state perspective.
Club histories, by contrast, have abounded, not only in South Australia and Western Australia, but in Victoria and Tasmania as well.
Gerard Dowling's The North (Melbourne) Story (originally published in 1972, updated a quarter of a century and three premierships later) is unashamedly universalist in approach, its author clearly perceiving the club of which he writes as contributing to and being embedded in a genuinely Australian rather than merely Melbourne-based culture. Such an attitude is almost unique, certainly amongst authors of books about football clubs in the state of Victoria. Nevertheless, volumes such as Harry Gordon's The Hard Way (Hawthorn), Michael Maplestone's Flying Higher (Essendon), The Point Of It All (St Kilda) by Feldmann and Holmesby, Unleashed (Footscray) by Lack, McConville, Small and Wright, and Brian Hansen's Tigerland (Richmond) all manage to inform and enlighten despite the disabling myopia of their philosophical starting points.
Mike Coward's Men of Norwood: the Red and Blue Blooded is a rarity among books about Australian football in being literate, percipient and engaging; perhaps its only fault lies in its brevity.
John Wood has provided Bound For Glory: the Story of the Port Adelaide Football Club 1939-1990 and The Centenary History of the North Adelaide Football Club Inc., but both are somewhat cursory, superficial treatments compared to his book about the Magarey Medal (SA Greats: the History of the Magarey Medal) and Gentleman Jack, his autobiography of John Cahill. More successful and persuasive than Wood's other club histories is Pride of the Bay (Glenelg), which was posthumously completed - and, one suspects, significantly embellished - by Peter Cornwall.
True Blue: the History of the Sturt Football Club by John Lysikatos, although inconsistently and sometimes tritely written, successfully reminds its readers that Australian football has long been an expansive and variegated beast extending its impact and influence well beyond the cloistered, self obsessed confines of Melbourne suburbia.
Jack Lee's mid-1970s examinations of the histories of East Fremantle (Old Easts 1948-1975) and - with Frank Harrison - South Fremantle (The South Fremantle Story 1900-1975 Volume 1 & Volume 2) emerge from the same essential frame of reference as Lysikatos' work and are similarly exhaustive, if bland. Matters of style aside, it would be virtually impossible to imagine such works emerging out of today's culture in which 'AFL' (which originally stood for 'Australian Football League') apparently no longer describes an Australian football competition but instead has somehow become shorthand for the sport of Australian Rules football itself.
In Tasmania, recent treatments of the histories of the Clarence, Glenorchy, North Hobart and North Launceston football clubs have retrospectively achieved unanticipated levels of poignancy following the virtual collapse of high level football in that state. In themselves, however, the treatments tend to be both formulaic and parochial, although Alison Alexander's You're In Roo Country: the Clarence District Football Club 1884-1996 is redeemed somewhat by its author's intermittent attempts to humanise, and thereby to some extent to transcend, her ostensible subject matter.
Biographies and autobiographies have always been the most prevalent kinds of football books but latterly they have become almost ubiquitous. Most tend to be ghost-written (and hence, almost by definition, highly superficial) accounts of the careers of players nearing or just entering retirement, but there have been some noteworthy exceptions. Steve Hawke's Polly Farmer: a Biography, for instance, with its intimate but never obsequious or sycophantic treatment of arguably Australian football's greatest ever player, perhaps comes as close as virtually any other football book to the standards set in sports with more portentous literary traditions, such as cricket and baseball. Hawke's writing style, never ostentatious or contrived, conveys a measured, reasoned appreciation of its subject, but remains sufficiently detached to enable the reader readily and reasonably to concoct an independent judgement of his own.
Such objectivity is rare. The Great Laurie Nash by E.A. Wallish, for example, is a relentless, unabashed torrent of largely unreasoned adulation, which persists without the merest hint of dilution throughout its almost 400 pages - sycophancy of the worst, most irrational, blinkered, and doggedly infatuated kind, but scarcely atypical. Wayne Miller's, Vikki Petraitis' and Victor Jeremiah's The Great John Coleman is similarly fawning, while self adulation is equally endemic, as exemplified in autobiographies by players from such diverse backgrounds as Jack Dyer, Royce Hart (who (in)famously selects himself in his 'best ever' team), and Greg Williams.
Whither then for the genre of Australian football literature (if there is such a genre)? It has become something of a platitude to observe that the world is currently undergoing a kind of 'information revolution'. What one takes this to mean, in very broad terms, is that the widespread proliferation of the printed word, coupled with burgeoning electronic media of various sorts, is significantly transforming the methods used by individuals to endeavour to communicate with each other. (The term 'endeavour to' is crucial: information saturation in no way guarantees efficacy of communication, indeed is arguably inimical to it.)
This in turn has fundamental implications for the ways in which societies comport themselves.
As far as the history of Australian football is concerned, the effects of these developments are ambiguous, for while information of a purportedly historical kind is undoubtedly more prevalent than ever, its relevance and value tend not to equate, even remotely, to its volume. The chief reason for this is that so pervasive and irresistible are the cultural preconceptions of our age - preconceptions which, to some extent, owe their very existence to the 'information revolution' referred to earlier - that they undermine, taint and distort all attempts to examine and account for historical events in a candid, objective manner. Thus, for example, perceptions and preconceptions relating to the present day Australian Football League tend to be indiscriminately, if to a large extent unwittingly, projected onto observations made about the organisation widely, if spuriously, regarded as its sole progenitor, the Victorian Football League. In 1996 therefore the AFL felt justified in congratulating itself for having been in existence, as 'Australia's premier football competition', for one year short of a hundred (see footnote), spawning in the process a mass (some would say 'morass') of celebratory literature, which collectively espoused, if not indeed helped create, the beguiling myth, now almost universally accepted, that the acronyms 'VFL' and 'AFL' were, to all intents and purposes, interchangeable. An automatic corollary of this assumption was that achievements by players and clubs outside this retrospectively contrived 'elite' were of scant importance, the contemporary evaluations of such achievements notwithstanding.
Of course, ethnocentrism of some measure is unavoidable. The 'information revolution', however, has given rise to a culture replete with ethnocentric behaviour and attitudes, one in which blinkered, crass or facile assumptions have, via the intellectual equivalent of osmosis, become so deeply ingrained as to be indistinguishable from reality. Engaging in genuine historical research which at least pays some heed to the perceptions and predilections of the past therefore becomes, if not quite impossible, extremely problematical, for not only is difficult to identify the truth against a backdrop of rampant fabrication, even in the unlikely event that one manages to do so there is almost certainly not going to be anyone capable of understanding or even, indeed, of paying due attention.
Where now?or
The technical term for this, apparently, at least as far as the AFL is concerned, is a 'centenary'. Back