Almanac Footy History: Some background to ‘Football’s Forgotten Years’

 

Colin Carter will be our special guest at the Footy Almanac Lunch at the North Fitzroy Arms Hotel on Friday, March 3. All welcome. Details HERE.

 

 

 

 

 

Colin Carter is a former AFL Commissioner (1993-2007) and Geelong Football Club president (2011-2020). He often wondered why the organised competition of Australian footy in and around Melbourne in the late nineteenth century was not included in the footy’s history; that the formation of the VFL 1897 was seen as the start of it all. There had to be good reason. So he went looking for it. The evidence he found compelled him to argue for a new way of thinking for reasons he outlines in his recently released book  Football’s Forgotten Years.

 

Here Colin (and publisher Geoff Slattery) introduce the book:

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The history of Australian football has been well recorded, from its genesis in Melbourne’s parklands in the 1850s, but less well understood is the history of the competition that evolved to become the AFL. For nigh on 100 years, the competition has been deemed to start in 1897.

 

But that date is wrong. It should be 1870 and new research makes it very clear that 1870 is the date that the VFL founders agreed upon. The football world—through the latter part of the 19th century, and all the way to the 1920s—viewed 1870 as the first year of the top-level competition in Victoria that led eventually to the VFL and then the AFL. However, the competition’s foundation story changed, and a lot of important football history has been misplaced.

 

In the VFL’s early years, various lists of premierships were published in VFL-endorsed publications such as The Football Record, as well as in all the major newspapers—all setting the competition’s starting point as 1870. Celebrating premierships in the VFL years after 1896, clubs would note that their most recent premiership was its third, or fifth, or sixth. For example, Essendon won the first VFL premiership in 1897 and newspaper reports of its annual meeting noted that the club “for the fifth time won the premiership”.

 

Writing in The Argus in 1902, Reg (Old Boy) Wilmot wrote emphatically: “The premiership competition has been carried on since 1870, so that this is the thirty-third season”. There can be no more definitive description of the competition’s history. Wilmot, one of three inductees to the media section of the Australian Football Hall of Fame, was one of the most authoritative sports writers of his time. Another famous football journalist was John Healy writing in The Australasian under the name of ‘Markwell’. In 1908, after Carlton had won its third successive premiership, Markwell wrote, with similar conviction: “Looking back through the performances of clubs from 1870, the year in which premiership contests started, I find that the old club [Carlton] heads the list nine times.” These articles, written years after the VFL was formed, are representative of the prevailing view at the time—which was that their competition had started in 1870.

 

There was almost complete acceptance of this for the first two decades of the new VFL, but the narrative then gradually changed. By the mid-1920s, almost 30 years after the VFL was formed, the competition’s foundation years, from 1870 to 1896, had disappeared, airbrushed from the competition’s history. Records of the years between 1877 and 1896 are now buried deep in the AFL’s official Season Guide in a section called ‘Other Competitions’. The seven seasons between 1870 and 1876 have disappeared altogether.

 

Every premiership in those ‘forgotten’ 27 years was won by a team in the AFL competition today. And in 1896, for example, a season that is no longer part of the competition’s records, eleven of the 13 teams in that competition are AFL clubs. How could that competition not be part of the AFL competition’s history?

 

It is now clear that the AFL has a history problem—which prompts the question: how did this happen? Why did the story of the competition’s origins shift so dramatically? Football’s Forgotten Years addresses the question and explains how this re-writing of history happened.  Understanding the continuing conflict and rivalry between the VFL and VFA is key to unravelling what took place; ignoring the years before the split meant that the important role of the VFA in the game’s formation did not have to be acknowledged. Football politics prompted a re-writing of the competition’s history.

 

The book argues that the years before 1897 were fundamental to the development of the code and provided the platform for much of today’s success. Interestingly, the VFA has not laid claim to the pre-1897 years either. Both the VFL and VFA turned their backs on the pre-1897 era— though for different political reasons.

 

Football’s Forgotten Years argues that it is time to reclaim the historical narrative of the game’s founders. Evidence now exists, and it is important to understand that this is not arguing for a rewriting of history. Rather, history was re-written, and the current official view is a distortion. It is time to put things right. Early heroes, stars of the forgotten years, have also been unfairly treated. Club histories are diminished—our clubs are among the oldest in the world. The nation-building impact of the code is ignored. And a very strong case can be made that the AFL competition is the oldest continuous football competition in the world.

 

 

Book for lunch HERE

 

 

Football’s Forgotten Years: Reclaiming the AFL Competition’s earliest era—1870 to 1896 by Colin Carter, is published by Slattery Books (books.slatterymedia.com).

 

 

You can buy books now:
https://books.slatterymedia.com/store/viewItem/football-s-forgotten-years