Aug 09 2008
Aussie Rules
Aussie Rules is surely the quickest and best spectator sport in the world.
It’s a form of football uniquely Australian, played non-stop, full of frenetic one-on-one contests, dodging, weaving, sustained running, kicking the ball on the run and great leaps to catch a high mark.
Aussie Rules predates all other modern forms of football, such as American, Canadian, Rugby Union and League, Association (Soccer) and Gaelic football.
An indigenous game?
There’s always someone with incontrovertible proof that Aussie Rules evolved from Gaelic football, and some one else who has hard evidence linking sports from the exclusive English schools in the 1850s. But this distinctive game could have been played up to 50,000 years ago, for there are a lot of Aboriginal people convinced that it’s an Aboriginal game. They will tell you the white fellas just added some rules.
And they have good reason for claiming the game as their own.
This black-and-white etching is the first image of football in Australia.
During an 1857 expedition to the Murray River in the north of Victoria, William Blandowski described young indigenous men playing a football game called marn grook. The etching shows them kicking, and preparing to mark, a spherical object.
Looks like football to me.
There’s an absolutely fabulous clip from the film Marn Grook that you really must look at!
It’s a short clip from the series Nganampa Anwernekenhe, produced by Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) Productions.
How Aussie Rules is played
Aussie Rules is played with two teams of 18 players on elliptical shaped playing grounds called, simply enough, ovals. The ball itself is an oblate spheroid.
The High Mark
The Mark is a clean catch of the ball after it’s been kicked by another player (either by a teammate or by the opposition), caught before it has touched the ground, or been touched by any other player, and after it has traveled a minimum of 15 metres.
The High Mark is the true glory of Aussie Rules, where a combination of forward momentum, spring and “climbing” with the knee or foot off an opponent’s back can send you five, six, seven feet off the ground in order to make a clean catch that earns a free kick, which often means a shot at goal.
The game is played non-stop, no “quiet spells”, it’s flat out from the first bounce to the final siren accompanied by constant cheering which erupts periodically into a spine-tingling roar that can be heard literally miles away.
A quick look at the little video and you get an idea of the speed of this game. Can you beat those spectacular high marks? You have to be bloody fit to play Aussie Rules.
And detractors from rival football disciplines refer to Aussie Rules as Aerial Ping Pong!
Each weekend during the colder months thousands of Australians flock to footy ovals around the country to support their teams, to barrack for their club. This barracking is a serious social ritual. Once it denoted class, status and religious affiliation, and was responsible for street brawls and inter-neighbourhood hostilities.
The Wearing of the Club Colours
In modern times it involves the enthusiastic wearing of club colours, often emblazoned with the number of a favourite player, at every opportunity. It’s perfectly acceptable to wear a footy scarf to church or to the opera.
When children are born in Victoria
they are wrapped in the club-colours,
laid in beribboned cots,
having already begun a lifetime’s barracking….
says poet Bruce Dawe from Fitzroy, Victoria, home of one of the oldest Aussie Rules football clubs.
Next door to Fitzroy is Collingwood, a semi-industrial suburb on the river flat which was exempt from building control laws in the Depressions of the 1890s and 1930s. The Poor and the Dispossessed once concentrated here, in what was almost a Roman Catholic enclave, and their pride was the Collingwood Football Club.
The Club
Popular playwright, David Williamson, had a hit with The Club in the 1970s (although the screen adaptation was not entirely successful).
The play was set in an unnamed club that was obviously Collingwood, with the fictional characters instantly recognisable to audiences: a self-made meat pie millionaire; a drunken buffoon with a mean streak; an oily administrator and the most expensive recruit in league history who refuses to play because he’s having an existential crisis.
The play was written at a specific time, when professionalism was taking over the game and changing the idea of club loyalty among players and coaches. It was intended as a satire, not just on sport, but on society in general, and masculine codes of behaviour in particular.
It’s an excellent window into the changing values of the latter part of the 20th century.
“The Club” remains one of my favourite theatrical productions, not least for its happy ending - Collingwood wins the Grand Final.
Like to shout me a cold beer?
