Thread by @AustHistAssoc

Good morning on Grand Final day of the AFL's male football competition.

To quote Manning Clark again. It's a day where 'a strange infirmity' strikes many 'many of the inhabitants of Melbourne, and indeed of the whole of Australia'.

MK

#AFLGF

But before getting to the almost always pathologised passions of footy barrackers, I want to chat a bit about the contested origins of the game.

MK

A quick note on origins first.

Rather than engage in the seemingly never-ending quest to definitely prove certain origins, I'm more interested in the way debates about origins point to the powerful meaning a game like Australian Rules has.

MK

When the 'laws' of Australian Rules football were first codified in 1859, they drew on various English forms of 'football'.

All the initial rules were already part of different forms of football played in England.

But did the game also draw on Aboriginal forms of football?

MK

Tom Wills, the most celebrated of the four men to 'create' the initial rules, had spent a lot of time with the Djab Wurrung people in western Victoria.

And the Djab Wurrung played a form of football commonly known as 'Marn Grook'.

MK

There is no clear written evidence linking Marn Grook to the first laws of Australian Rules football.

However, as Ciannon Cazaly noted in an article suitably subtitled ‘Football’s History Wars’, those dismissing the link rely exclusively on the colonial archive.

MK

As Barry Judd observes:

'It is a colonial past that history is able to reconstruct, a past that says little or nothing about
Indigenous experience or Indigenous remembrance of that same past carried into the present
from the other side of the colonial frontier.'

MK

You can read more on this debate, and some suggestions for future research that explores the experience and impact of Indigenous Australians here:

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

More recently Roy Hay has built on the work of Athas Zafiris to look at 'Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century', trove.nla.gov.au/work/235527370…

While Barry Judd has also written on 'Colonial Identity in Football', https://t.co/Oudh80aqwp

MK

As with Australia, Australian Rules football continues to be shaped by the racist violence of invasion + ongoing colonisation.

This was most clearly shown when footy barrackers turned the art of booing into an act of racial hatred towards the Indigenous player Adam Goodes.

MK

Sean Gorman's 'Brotherboys' provides context for what later unfolded with Adam Goodes, trove.nla.gov.au/work/8263721?q….

MK

My history with Gary Osmond of the iconic image of Nicky Winmar declaring that he was 'Black and Proud' also sets Aussie Rules within the broader context of Australian race-relations.

trove.nla.gov.au/work/183335860

MK

The history of Sir Doug Nicholls provides another insight into the still problematic relationship of the AFL to Indigenous Australians.

MK

Nicholls was initially unable to play in the Victorian Football League (later the AFL), due to the racism of the Carlton Football Club.

He later starred for Northcote in the Victorian Football Association, before doing the same for Fitzroy in the VFL.

MK

Nicholls played for both the VFA and VFL at state level.

He created and fostered Aboriginal footy carnivals.

And of course he also worked tireless on behalf of Indigenous Australians more generally.

MK

Doug Nicholls was the first Aboriginal to be knighted & the first to be made the governor of a state.

He should be spoken of in the same terms that Jackie Robinson is in the USA.

MK

The AFL finally recognised Nicholls by naming its Indigenous Round after him in 2016.

Yet the Australian Football Hall of Fame has repeatedly decided to NOT induct Nicholls into the Hall of Fame.

MK

Those in the Hall of Fame 'have made significant contributions' to Australian Rules football.

The only rationale for not including Doug Nicholls is that he did not play enough VFL games.

But that was because he was initially excluded on racist grounds.

MK

It is a testament to the way Australia's purported ideals of sporting meritocracy fail to engage with structural racism (among other things).

I wrote more about this with Gregory Phillips here: theconversation.com/the-land-we-pl…