How Football Began by Tony Collins

Author:Tony Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Trans-hemispheric football influences

The similarities between Australian Rules and Gaelic football today are well known. Since 1984 an ill-fitting ‘International Rules’ tournament has been played between representative Australian and Irish national sides under a compromise set of rules. And, as we saw earlier, when Australia began breaking from the apron strings of its British ‘Mother Country’ in the 1960s, the idea that Australian Rules was derived from Gaelic football became popular. However, it is far more likely that Australian Rules had some influence on the rules of Gaelic football.

Ireland in the late nineteenth century had a multitude of links to Australia. Irish immigrants accounted for something like 25 per cent of the total Australian population in the nineteenth century, and familial and business links between Australia and Ireland were plentiful.26 Michael Cusack’s sister emigrated there in 1864, joining numerous cousins.27 Michael Davitt, the founder of the Land League and one of the GAA’s three original patrons, spent several months down under in 1895 and discussed what Ireland could learn from Australia in his 1898 book Life and Progress in Australia. Many Irish families settled in Melbourne, where jobs were plentiful, and became part of its football culture. Collingwood FC, based in industrial north Melbourne, was supported by many Irish Catholics, while the popularity of neighbouring Fitzroy FC among its Irish population earned the club the nickname ‘The Fenians’.

Links with football in Ireland were common. Up until the 1870s, matches of indeterminate rules against visiting Irish regiments often took place in Melbourne, such as Hotham’s 5–0 drubbing of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment in 1870.28 News from ‘home’ often included sporting chat. In 1887 the Sydney edition of the Freeman’s Journal published the GAA’s latest set of football rules, while the following year The Tasmanian newspaper in Launceston discussed recent developments in Gaelic football.29 Thus family ties, military visits and the easy availability of news meant that sport played a significant role in the cultural links between Irish citizens in Ireland and Australia.

This can clearly be seen in hurling. As Pat Bracken’s painstaking research has uncovered, hurling was played extensively by Irish communities in Australia.30 At least twenty hurling clubs were active in Victoria between 1877 and the formation of the GAA in 1884. In April 1878 clubs around Melbourne formed their own Victorian Hurling Club Association (VHCA) and drew up a code of rules for the game. Among its members were clubs in the Melbourne football hotbeds of Collingwood, Richmond, Prahan and Brighton. The VHCA’s sixteen rules incorporated some of the features of Australian Rules football, including the distinctive goal posts with no cross bar and two accompanying side posts. When Maurice Davin came to draw up the GAA’s rules, he used the same sized playing pitch, agreed that twenty-one would be the maximum size of a team, and in 1886 included the distinctively Australian second set of posts.31

Of course, this does not mean that the GAA simply copied the Australians. Rules for hurling were also drawn up in Ireland in the same period, for example by clubs in Killimor (1869), Trinity College (1870) and Dublin (1883).

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