‘Scots whahae’ made Australian football ‘for guid or ill’

ABSTRACT

It will not surprise the readers of this journal that the Scots had a significant influence on the code of football most Australians probably still call soccer. What is less well known is their positive and negative impact on the domestic code, known by outsiders as Australian Rules, but internally by fiat of the Australian Football League as Australian football. This is a much more complex story involving massacres of Indigenous people, but also supporting them at a time when the majority of the incomers regarded them as less than human. Scots played a vital part in the origin and early history of the Australian code and on both sides of the big split over professionalism in the 1890s. Scots were the first to form soccer clubs based on the communities and allegiances from which they had come rather than geographical districts in Australia, with implications for image of the game and its place in Australian society thereafter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Poulter, Sharing Heritage.

2. Flanagan, The Call.

3. Hocking and Reidy, ‘Marngrook’; Thompson, ‘Marngrook and Aussie Rules’; Pascoe and Papalia, ‘A Most Manly and AmusingGame’.

4. Hibbins, ‘Myth and History’; Collins, ‘The Invention of Sporting Tradition’; de Moore, Tom Wills; Hay, Aboriginal People.

5. Mark, ‘AFL’s Position on Indigenous History’.

6. Smith et al., ‘Fractional Identities’, 15–32. I owe this reference to Athas Zafiris.

7. The exception in cricket is the Victorian Indigenous team that went to England in 1868, several years before the first white cricket tourists ventured there. See Mulvaney and Harcourt, Cricket Walkabout.

8. Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, 14.

9. Geoff Blainey by email, ‘In the mid and late 1850s the Scots in Victoria had a higher proportion (close to 20 percent in the 1854 census) of the total population than they held in any other colony – here they almost equalled the Irish. I am treating the Presbyterians as equivalent to the Scots though I know that many of them were from Northern Ireland, and I am treating the Catholics as equivalent to the Irish though many of those came from Ireland and, I assume, Scotland. I have just calculated this from the raw figures on religion in that bicentennial volume’; Vamplew, Australians: Historical Statistics.

10. Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances and his work on what they did in Australia; Watson, Caledonia Australis.

11. ‘The Black Watch and the Verdict of History’, Age, April 27, 2002, https://www.theage.com.au/national/the-black-watch-and-a-verdict-of-history-20020427-gdu5tt.html; Flyn, ‘Cal Flyn: The Terrible Truths in My Family History’, Australian, April 23, 2016, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/cal-flyn-the-terrible-truths-in-my-family-history/news-story/7785e4d89d6cd479139be969a88f4047; Flyn, Thicker Than Water; Partland, ‘Western District Memorial’; Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder,124, 127–30, 245.

12. Ryanetal., Colonial Frontier Massacres.

13. Landholding data from Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, 220, 528.

14. Clark, and Cahir, ‘John Green’.

15. Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk; Nanni and James, Coranderrk; Hay, Aboriginal People.

16. Corris, ‘James (Jimmy) Dawson, 1806–1890ʹ; Clark, ‘James Dawson’s Intervention in the Naming of the Maroondah Aqueduct’; James Dawson, ‘The Aborigines’, Argus, September 9, 1876, 10.

17. Murray, Memories of the Old College of Glasgow, 443–5.

18. Russell, ‘John McAdam, 1827–1865ʹ.

19. Hibbins, ‘The Founders’, 32.

20. Greg de Moore, ‘Tom Wills and His Links with Scotch’, Great Scot, 2008, updated June 24, 2013, https://www.scotch.vic.edu.au/greatscot/2008decGS/48.htm.

21. Beckett, ‘Football in its Cradle’, Herald, March 16, 1935, 29.

22. Dalmahoy Campbell, family tree, https://gw.geneanet.org/belfast8?lang=en&n=campbell&oc=0&p=dalmahoy.

23. ‘The Border Games’, Geelong Advertiser, July 16, 1850, 1.

24. Hay, ‘Football in Australia Before Codification’.

25. ‘Born in gold rush era: How Australian game was launched’, Barrier Miner, 6 April 1935, 8.

26. Hay, ‘Researching the Origins’, esp. 50–2.

27. ‘Born in the gold rush era: How the Australian game was launched’, Barrier Miner, April 6, 1935, 8.

28. T.S. Marshall, Paper on Football: Read at the Annual Meeting of the Victorian Football Association held on Friday 24 April 1896, copy supplied by Col Hutchinson, statistician and historian of the Australian Football League in 2020. Copy in possession of the author.

29. Hay, ‘The Caledonian Challenge Cup’.

30. Pennings and Pascoe, ‘The Corio Oval Tribe’.

31. There are excellent brief biographies of Robert and Alexander McCracken in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mccracken-robert-4070 and http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mccracken-alexander-7326.

32. Hay, Aboriginal People, 1, 99, 101.

33. Hay, ‘Another Local Hero’; Hay, Albert ‘Pompey’ Austin.

34. Hay, Aboriginal People, 195.

35. Ian Clark, by email, copy in the possession of the author; Hay, ‘What Happened Next’.

36. Hay, ‘What Happened Next’.

37. Hay, ‘Football’s First Free Kick’.

38. Hay, ‘Football in Australia before codification’.

39. Harvey, ‘Football’; Smith, ‘Evolvements’; Hay, Harvey and Smith, ‘Football Before Codification’.

40. Syson, The Game That Never Happened.

41. Hay, ‘Our Wicked Foreign Game’.

42. Mosely, Soccer in New South Wales, 291–7.

43. Hay, Aboriginal People, 229.

44. Kreider, The Soccerites.

45. Syson, The Game That Never Happened, 91–123; John Williamson, Soccer Anzacs, 113.

46. Hay, Oral History, 47.