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Abstract
This paper traces the emergence of an Anti-Football League in Melbourne in the late 1960s. In so doing it charts the way the extremely rapid transformation of Melbourne in the 1850s from a frontier town to a major metropolis set the scene for the emergence of a new form of football whose ensuing popularity was all the more noteworthy for the way it transcended (at least partially) traditional barriers of class and gender. The result was that all of Melbourne's inhabitants were presumed to share the general fascination with Australian Rules football. Yet while this may have made Australian Rules the envy of many other sporting codes, it caused significant suffering for those who did not share the fascination with football. At issue were problems of inclusion and community, but not as they have generally been examined in studies of sport history. For the members of the Anti-Football League did not want to be included in all the talk and community rituals surrounding Australian Rules football in Melbourne. However once founded, the anti-football group developed an uncanny resemblance to the community of football followers who had caused it such pain, finding joy in inverting the calendar and rituals of Australian Rules football and the (somewhat) mock battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that ensued.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gary Osmond, Rob Hess, Louis Magee, Fiona Kerr, Joy Damousi, Esther Faye, Ann Westmore, Pam Thomas, Ashley Humphrey, the anonymous reviewers, and especially Alex McDermott, for their comments, suggestions and assistance. Warwick Anderson also remains a source of considerable guidance.
Notes
1. This and the following quotations are from Jo Chandler, ‘The Lost Tribe’, Age, 3 April 2010, 16.
2. The Anti-Football League has its own website, along with a MySpace page and Facebook group. A sympathetic article by football journalist Damian Barrett, ‘Smoking Ball is Back’, Herald Sun, 12 May 2007, also helped regenerate interest in the Anti-Football League after a period of dormancy in the 1990s.
3. See Davis, ‘“An Act of Desperation”’; Sandercock and Turner, Up Where, Cazaly?, 236–7; and Pascoe, The Winter Game, 232.
4. Crawford, ‘Anti-Football League’.
5. Riordan, Soviet Sport, 2; Mandle, ‘Cricket and Australian Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century’; Bale, Sportscapes; and Dyreson and Trumbour, The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States. See also the 2008 special issues of The International Journal of the History of Sport on ‘North America Crafting Patriotism’.
6. Nadel, ‘What Is a Football Community’; Andrews, ‘The Transformation of ‘‘Community’’’ parts 1 and 2; and McConville, ‘Footscray Identity and Football History’.
7. Andrews, ‘Football: The People's Game?’; Muyt, Maroon and Blue. Debate over the commercialisation of Australian Rules football began with the first scholarly history of the game, Sandercock and Turner's Up Where, Cazaly?, and continued through the journalist Linnell's Football Ltd; Hess and Stewart's More than a Game; and Stewart's The Games are Not the Same.
8. For more on this see Hughson, The Making of Sporting Cultures; Klugman, ‘Loves, Suffering and Identification’; and Klugman, Passion Play.
9. I am indebted here to Dyreson's ‘Discovering the “Folk Art” of the Heartland Region’. See also Lynd and Lynd, Middletown; and Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition.
10. Caccamona, Back to Middletown. Journalist Buzz Bissinger's laudable Friday Night Lights shows how central American football can also be to towns in the United States.
11. Pope and Nauright's Routledge Companion to Sports History, gives a good overview of the many different nations who view themselves as sport-obsessed. On Australian and Melbourne sporting obsessions see Stoddart, Saturday Afternoon Fever; Cashman, Paradise of Sport; Matthews, The Temple Down the Road; White, Inventing Australia; Adair and Vamplew, Sport in Australian History; and Ward, Sport in Australian National Identity. For an early popular account see Dunstan, Sports.
12. A few notable examples include James, Beyond a Boundary; Nathan, Saying It's So; Collins, Rugby's Great Split; Fuller, Sport, Rhetoric and Gender; Mangan and Vertinsky, Gender, Sport, Science; Anderson, In the Game; and Symons, The Gay Games.
13. Booth and Tatz, One-Eyed.
14. Derrida, Points … . For an helpful explication of this see Pavlich, ‘The Force of Community’.
15. Bale, Anti-Sport Sentiments in Literature.
16. See for example, Hill, ‘Review’.
17. Bale, Anti-Sport Sentiments in Literature, 7–16.
18. For soule see Magoun, ‘Football in Medieval England’. For hooliganism see Pearson, Hooligan; Dunning et al ., The Roots of Football Hooliganism; Spaaij and Vinãs, ‘Passion, Politics and Violence’.
19. For American football see WRA, Jr., ‘Anti-Football Legislation’; Watterson, ‘The Gridiron Crisis of 1905’; and Amen et al., ‘Impact of Playing American Professional Football on Long-Term Brain Function’.
20. Doyle, ‘Foolish and Useless Sport’; and Fozooni, ‘Religion, Politics and Class’, 364.
21. Michallatt, ‘Terrain de lutte’.
22. Magoun, ‘Football in Medieval England’. See also Carter, Sports and Pastimes of the Middle Ages.
23. See for example, Collins, ‘National Sports and Other Myths’; Hay, ‘“Our Wicked Foreign Game”’; Syson, ‘Shadow of a Game’; and Hallinan and Hughson, The Containment of Soccer in Australia.
24. Armstrong and Guilianotti trace this term back to a 1968 Argentinian newspaper editorial in their book Fear and Loathing in World Football.
25. See for example http://members.ozemail.com.au/∼sharptongue/anti-football.html; and http://www.football-sucks.com.
26. Numerous websites detailing and promoting this run can be found by conducting an Internet search for ‘anti-football run’.
27. One weakness of Australian sports history is a lack of attention to place – and in particular to regional and state differences. See Adair, ‘Australian Sport History’, 412; and Hess and Klugman, ‘Australian Sporting Culture’, 168–9.
28. Sandercock and Turner, Up Where, Cazaly?, 237; Buzo, Sydney, 11. Pascoe provides a more nuanced mention of the Anti-Football League by briefly locating it in terms of humour and Australian Rules football. See Pascoe, The Winter Game, 232.
29. Dunstan, No Brains at All, 191.
30. Ibid., 192.
31. Ibid., 207.
32. Keith Dunstan, ‘A Place in the Sun’, Sun-News Pictorial, 17 April 1967, 9.
33. Ibid.; Dunstan, No Brains at All, 192.
34. Keith Dunstan, ‘A Place in the Sun’, Sun-News Pictorial, 20 April 1967, 9.
35. Keith Dunstan, ‘A Place in the Sun’, Sun-News Pictorial, 28 April 1967, 9.
36. Ibid.
37. Pringle, ‘Defamiliarizing Heavy-Contact Sport’.
38. For more on this see Klugman, ‘The Premiership is Everything’.
39. Dunstan, No Brains at All, 192.
40. Ann Westmore, personal communication, July 2010. Westmore was the then medical reporter for the Sun News-Pictorial, and fondly recalls the Sunday lunchtime gatherings at the paper where Dunstan would hold forth, explaining his anti-football position (among other things) with reason and wit. Although Westmore had followed the Melbourne Football Club with considerable devotion since she was a young girl, the strength of Dunstan's argument convinced her to become a member of the Anti-Football League, although she later re-embraced football.
41. Dunstan, No Brains at All, 192.
42. Keith Dunstan, ‘A Place in the Sun’, Sun News-Pictorial, 28 April 1967.
43. Keith Dunstan, ‘A Place in the Sun’, Sun News-Pictorial, 11 May 1967, 9.
44. Keith Dunstan, ‘A Place in the Sun’, Sun News-Pictorial, 1 May 1967, 9.
45. This AFL preceded the AFL of the Australian Football League by more than two decades.
46. Dunstan, No Brains at All, 192–3.
47. Ibid., 193–4.
48. Ibid., 194.
49. Keith Dunstan, ‘A Place in the Sun’, Sun News-Pictorial, 20 June 1967, 9. There were also some letters from Australian Rules football barrackers decrying the very idea of the Anti-Football League. These letters tended to be very aggressive in nature, but were greatly outnumbered by those sent by people wanting to become members.
50. Keith Dunstan, ‘A Place in the Sun’, Sun News-Pictorial, 23 June 1967, 9. Dunstan was ‘chuffed’ that in less than a week the Anti-Football League had managed to create strong rapport with New South Wales, something he claimed that the Victorian Football League had been unable to manage in over 80 years.
51. Damian Barrett, ‘Smoking Ball is Back’, Herald Sun, 12 May 2007.
52. Cashman, ‘The Australian Sporting Obsession’, 48 (emphasis added).
53. Some similarities can be drawn between the argument that follows and the way the values, culture and practices of colonial Australian, and in particularly Melbourne, shaped the development of the Melbourne Cup into Australia's most important horse race and something of a national day. For an overview see O'Hara, ‘Melbourne Cup’.
54. Serle, The Golden Age. See also Lewis, Melbourne, 15–41.
55. Serle, The Golden Age, 370.
56. For a comparative history of the Victorian and Californian gold rushes see Goodman, Gold Seeking.
57. See Hess et al ., A National Game; and de Moore, Tom Wills for a biography of the most influential figure in the initial development of the game. Other histories include Sandercock and Turner, Up Where, Cazaly?; Pascoe, The Winter Game; and Blainey, A Game of Our Own.
58. Hess et al., A National Game, 26ff. As is often the case, the definitive origins of the code are contested. For an overview see Cazaly, ‘Off the Ball’.
59. For more on the links between modern cities and the development of particular sporting cultures see Hughson, ‘The Making of Sporting Cultures’.
60. Hess et al., A National Game, 42–51; Cashman, ‘Australian Sport and Culture Before Federation’, 33.
61. John Stanley James [writing under the name, ‘A Vagabond’], ‘Manly Sports’, Argus, 30 September 1876, 9.
62. Morris, A Dictionary of Austral.
63. Wilkes, A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms.
64. Senyard, ‘The Barracker and the Spectator’, 49. See also O'Hara, ‘Barracking’. The main alternative etymologies argue ‘barracker’ recalled the British soldiers from the local barracks who were renowned for the vigour of their play and spectating (see Blainey, A Game of Our Own, 87–88, who might have been following the early-twentieth-century journalist Guy Innes via a note from Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 53) or point only to the Northern Irish verb (see for example the Macquarie Dictionary). Both of these alternatives, however, struggle to account for the initial connotations of jeering and also the early pejorative use of the term.
65. James, Shall I Try Australia?, 129.
66. Ibid., 129–30.
67. See Hoad, ed., Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology; Testa and Armstrong, ‘Words and Actions’; and Foot, Calcio. Like ‘barracker’, the term ‘fan’ emerged in the 1880s while tifosi was coined in the early twentieth century after association football took hold in Italy. While ‘fan’ is generally thought to be a contraction of fanatic, a term used to describe religious possession and insanity, its etymology is also contested. Peter Morris argues instead that ‘fan’ describes the interminable talk of supporters about baseball, blowing wind about as if they were human fans, while Paul Dickerson suggests that it is a contraction of fancy, itself a contraction of fantasy, meaning to take an intense, obsessive interest in something like the show-breeding of poultry. Notably, all three explanations refer to excessive behaviour. See Morris, ‘What it Means to be a Fan’; and Dickerson, The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary.
68. Cashman, ‘Australian Sport and Culture Before Federation’, 29.
69. Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, 254.
70. Hess, ‘“Ladies are Specially Invited”’, 114.
71. Ibid., 121.
72. See Senyard, ‘The Barracker and the Spectator’.
73. McCalman, Struggletown, 140.
74. Much work remains to be done on the early social and cultural history of Melbourne despite the impressive tomes of Serle (The Golden Age; and The Rush to be Rich) and Davison (The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne). This section is informed by these works and a number of others including McDermott's impressive, if disconcertingly titled, Australian History for Dummies.
75. The gendered language is intentional, for the Chartists were initially more interested in attaining voting rights for white men rather than for (white) women. For a brief history of the Chartists in colonial Australia see Collins, ‘Political Ideology in Australia’.
76. As the historian Keith Hancock observed, the Chartists largely realised their complete political aims ‘within ten years of the discovery of gold’. Hancock, Australia, 54.
77. For more on this see Kimber and Love, The Time of Their Lives.
78. See also Sinclair, The Process of Economic Development in Australia. For a comparison of women working in factories in Melbourne and London during this period see Thornton, ‘Factory Girls’.
79. Trollope, Australia, 386.
80. Cashman, ‘Australian Sport and Culture Before Federation’, 29.
81. Continuing issues with the size of the crowds, such as the encroachment of spectators onto the playing arena, led to a shift to the enclosed cricket grounds which were largely free in winter when football was being played. See Grow, ‘From Gum Trees to Goalposts’; and Blainey, A Game of Our Own.
82. Twopeny, Town Life in Australia.
83. Ibid., 74.
84. Further work needs to conducted as to the effects that Melbourne's emerging egalitarian culture may have had on the history of other sports. Indeed, Ian Turner, commenting on a piece by Bill Mandle comparing cricket and football in England and Victoria in the late 1800s, suggests that different attitudes towards professionalism were likely to be informed by differing class relationships and local attitudes towards leisure. Turner, ‘A Comment’, 538; and Mandle, ‘Games People Played’.
85. On Australian football codes and sexism see Bryson, ‘Sport and the Oppression of Women’; and Warren, ‘Footballers, Culture, and Sexual Assault’. On racism see Tatz, Obstacle Race; and Klugman and Osmond, ‘That Picture’. And on homophobia see Watts, ‘In the Pink’.
86. Lallo, ‘A Boy in Blue, Again’, ‘Green Guide Magazine’, Age, 15 July 2010, 3.
87. Koval, ‘Thighs and Whispers’, 89 (the quote refers to a condensed version of the question, ‘Who do you barrack for?’).
88. Michael Llalo and Jonathan Green, ‘The Ties that Blind’, ‘Melbourne Magazine’, Age, May 2006, 90.
89. The writer Mary Pershall provides a more recent example of this in ‘The Mark of a Local’, Age, 26 June 2010, 14–15.
90. McNamara, ‘Speaking a Second Language’, 58.
91. These quotations are drawn from the interview with Temple in Muyt's evocative Maroon and Blue.
92. On O'Dowd, see Burke, ‘Workplace Football, Working-Class Culture and the Labour Movement in Victoria, 1910–20’; and on Barrows see Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, 285.
93. Johnston, The Australians, 260.
94. Keith Dunstan, ‘The Year of the Anti-Football League’, Sun News-Pictorial, 17 June 1967, 19.
95. Douglas Wilkie, ‘As the President Sees it’, Sun News-Pictorial, 17 June 1967, 19.
96. Dunstan, No Brains at All, 195, 197.
97. Ibid., 196.
98. Ibid., 196–202.
99. Ibid., 201.
100. The development of this peculiar institution, with all its talk about the awfulness ‘of all that talk’, might be thought of as similar to the creation of a new myth which seeks to resolve the impossible paradox of an earlier myth, while keeping the excess, and its associated jouissance, alive. For more on this see Lacan ‘The Neurotic's Individual Myth’; and Grigg, Lacan, Language and Philosophy, 37–53.