Almanac Footy History: Aboriginal Umpires

 

 

 

By Roy Hay

 

Senior readers of the Footy Almanac will remember Glenn James, an umpire of rare ability, who took charge of two grand finals in the 1980s. He was, and I think still is, the only Indigenous person to umpire a top-level game in the VFL/AFL. But he wasn’t the first Indigenous footy umpire and there were two of them in the Upper Yarra Valley in the nineteenth century. Dick Rowan and Robert Wandin, senior, from Coranderrk, umpired games in the Lilydale, Healesville and District competitions, sometimes as goal umpires, sometimes in the middle. Both were former players with Lilydale, Coranderrk and Healesville. When Lilydale set off to play Mitcham in May 1890, the train was late in leaving, but spirits were lifted when the locals found that Rowan and Thomas Dunnolly from Coranderrk were already aboard. Both were named among the best players, but they could not prevent Mitcham winning the game. When Hawthorn came to Lilydale with only 18 men in September 1893, Robert Wandin filled in for the visitors along with a local player William Oliver.

 

Rowan played one non-League game for South Melbourne in 1892 and was invited to return the next year to play in the Victorian Football Association, but was refused permission to do so, by the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines of Victoria. ‘If he is allowed to play others will want to follow’, the Board determined. The result was that apart from Poorne Yarriworri, better known as Albert Pompey Austin who had a single game for Geelong in 1872, no Indigenous person played top level football in Victoria until the 1930s.[1] Since then there have only been around 40 Victorian Indigenous men, though Jamarra Ugle-Hagen, also from Framlingham, was the Number One pick for Western Bulldogs last season. The majority of Indigenous players today come from the Noongar in Western Australia, the Northern Territory or the Tiwi Islands. Victorian Indigenous men are still invisible, according to Jessica Coyle, who has researched the matter.[2]

 

Pic – to come

 

Dick Rowan, third from the left in the back row, and Robert Wandin, senior, second from left in the front row, with Indigenous men from Coranderrk, and others. Photo: N.J. Caire, 1893. Museum of Victoria.

 

 

Robert Wandin, senior, was one of William Barak’s right-hand men. He and Thomas Dunolly wrote many of the communications from the station during the rebellion in the 1880s. Their families were involved in football and politics right down to the present day. Robert Wandin’s nephew, James or Jarlo, played with Healesville and his son James or Juby, had several games for St Kilda in the VFL. Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin has delivered the Welcome to Country at AFL Grand Finals.

 

We also have a couple of photographs of Wandin or Rowan as umpire taken by Nicholas Caire in 1904, almost certainly on the same day and the same visit to Coranderrk. I can’t be certain which it is, though my guess would be Robert Wandin. These were posed photographs, frozen in time, not action shots. The other may well be one of the ‘players’ in both pictures. These pictures reinforce the idea that Wandin and Rowan switched from cricket to football and back again depending on the season. They were serious and respected men and obviously had a considerable influence on their contemporaries and those who came in contact with them.

 

 

 

[Aboriginal men playing football in a paddock, N. J. Caire, 1904. State Library of Victoria. Accession no: H141273.]

 

 

 

Aboriginal men playing cricket in a paddock. N.J. Caire, 1904. State Library of Victoria. Accession no: H141276.

 

 

Robert Wandin’s son, also Robert, was a star player in the first decade of the twentieth century. His absence, to attend to his duties on the death of William Barak, was given as one of the prime reasons why Healesville lost the grand final of the local tournament in 1903. Young Robert was a middle-distance runner and won the 800 yards races at Stawell two years in succession.

 

At the other end of Victoria, in the Western District, Angus King regularly umpired matches in the Heywood and District competition before the First World War. Angus was a star at cricket and football as was his brother William and both were well respected in sporting and the wider European communities.[3]

 

The King brothers (and their families) spent much of their lives at the Lake Condah Mission near Purnim on the Hopkins River between Portland and Mortlake, playing cricket and football for the Darlot Creek Wanderers and for several of the European teams in the Heywood and District League. The brothers were in demand for their skills at both games and turned out for other local teams, probably in receipt of payment for doing so on occasion.

 

Like many umpires Angus loved to get his picture in the team shots that were taken with winning teams in local competitions.He is on the front cover of the British edition of my Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century with Milltown when they won the local league in 1906. He also posed with the Coasters team from Portland when they won the local competition in 1902.

 

 

[Pic – to come]

Angus King with the Coasters team in 1902. Vern McCallum collection.

 

Don’t get the notion that Angus King just ingratiated himself with the white men. He fell out with the Rev. J H Stähle, Superintendent at Lake Condah and leased some land near Dunmore where he could be more independent and provided a temporary refuge for other members of the Indigenous community who could not stomach Stähle’s autocratic ways.[4]

 

In 1908 King was involved a controversy over a match in which he umpired. One critic accused him of partiality, but others came to his defence and he continued to be sought out for keenly contested and important games.

 

Angus died in 1916 during the First World War and left his wife in straitened circumstances. An appeal was raised in the Western District to help support his widow in which his contribution to both cricket and football as player and umpire was highlighted, but also the fact that he was in the eyes of his white contemporaries and his own people Aboriginal ‘royalty’.[5]

 

No doubt all these Indigenous men came in for much abuse from the sidelines, as umpires still do today. But there was often a harder racial edge to that in their case. Nevertheless, they persisted and won respect. Their stories are important as examples of agency on the part of Indigenous people. Too often they are portrayed as victims, rather than resilient human beings who made their mark on society through their skill, character and persistence.

 

 

[1]          Roy Hay, Albert Pompey Austin: A Man Between Two Worlds, SESA, Bannockburn, 2019.

[2]          Jessica Coyle, ‘Where Are All the Koorie Football Players? The AFL and the Invisible Presence of Indigenous Victorians’, Sport in Society vol. 18, no. 5, 2015, pp. 604–13.

[3]          Roy Hay, Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century: They Did Not Come from Nowhere, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, England, 2019. Australian edition, SESA, 2021, pp. 182–5.

[4]          Jan Critchett, Untold Stories, Melbourne University Press, 1998, pp. 148–180.

[5]          ‘Angus King’, Hamilton Spectator, 28 January 1916, p. 4.