AFL FUMBLING WESTERN SYDNEY 'HISTORY'

Sean Fagan of RL1908.com

In an attempt to gain "cultural connection" for its GWS team, Australian rules has turned to the code's historical ties to Sydney's west. The stories though being brought forth are at best tenuous, at worse creative myth-making.

Tom Wills Founder of Australian rules football.

The AFL's 2008 "The Game That Made Australia" marketing campaign faltered badly north of the Murray as everyone asked "Made what?" It showed the AFL had little understanding of how the code was viewed in "the non-football states" and the contribution made by the other codes to Australia.

Two recent instances centered upon the proposed GWS team have suggested that AFL has more historical connection to Sydney's west than anyone realised, going so far as to claim the code was "invented" and had its "genesis" in the lands beyond Homebush.

A closer look though suggests otherwise.

Kevin Sheedy told The Sydney Morning Herald in February that "This code is basically invented by a person who lived in the west of Sydney. Jock McHale, a legendary coach of our game, was born in Sydney. It's got some history that a lot of people don't realise." [link]

Sheedy's idea of the AFL pedigree of 1880s Sydney appears overstated, while his knowledge of the city's geography looks decidedly askew, given Botany bred McHale moved to Melbourne when he was five.

Meanwhile Greg de Moore - author of a biography on Melbourne rules founder Tom Wills and member of the AFL's "Community Advisory Group" for the GWS team - revealed on Ten News and via the University of Western Sydney (also a partner with the AFL in the Blacktown-based team) that the code's true creation was not in Melbourne, but remarkably in Sydney's west. [link]

"There's this historical view of Australian rules football, that it has little to do with Sydney and even less to do with Western Sydney, but here we have it, the heart of the game and the heart of the man's family is here where we stand," de Moore says.

"In 1823, Tom Will's mother Elizabeth entered the Female Orphan School on the banks of the Parramatta River at the age of six, and stayed there for a decade."

"Two years after leaving she gave birth* to Tom Wills, the inventor of Australian Rules Football. So for me, some people think the birth of Australian Rules Football belongs to Victoria, but I would argue the genesis began here, in Western Sydney."

Yeah right - by the logic of Sheedy and de Moore, Warrington-born Bob Fulton (who moved to NSW when four) is a great of English rugby league, John Farnham (born in Dagenham) is an icon of the British entertainment industry, and AC/DC are one of Scotland's greatest ever bands.

Interestingly, in November 2008 de Moore wrote in The Canberra Times [link] about Wills being born near Queanbeyan, and that on this basis "The people of the Australian Capital Territory can justly lay claim to Tom Wills."**

"I hope that the next time a boy or girl in the ACT watches a game of Australian Rules football they will know that Tom Wills - born near the nation's capital - has left them something unique in the world," de Moore wrote.

"The people of Canberra should take pride in the knowledge that the man who bequeathed one of the very few original contributions to Australian culture was born in their midst."

Of course, while the Australian rules community will bend and twist even the most feeble of historical ties to give weight to the code in Sydney's west (and elsewhere), evidence staring them in the face confirming the game's English origins is ignored or decried - despite Wills spending a half-a-decade at Rugby School where he played football, and the first rules of the Melbourne FC in 1859 being of a similar vein to many others in England at the time.

The reality is that 19th century Australia was little more than "a suburb of Britain" and Melbourne, then our largest city, was our local "High Street."

In a new study, National myths, imperial pasts and the origins of Australian Rules football, Dr Tony Collins (Professor of social history at Leeds Metropolitan University) has compared the early rules of the Melbourne code with those being played in schools and clubs throughout the UK at the time. [link]

"The set of rules developed in Melbourne in the 1850s and 1860s was simply one of many dozens of variations in the playing of football throughout the British Empire," explains Collins.

"It should therefore not be surprising that when we examine those features of early Australian Rules football that are held to be uniquely Australian, we can find their equivalents in the football codes played in the 'Mother Country'.

"The Melbourne rules were no more indicative of an Australian independence of mind than the Sheffield FA's rules were an expression of Yorkshire nationalism. Aussie Rules is merely one of those variations of British football that managed to survive and ultimately thrive."

The University of Western Sydney's Professor David Rowe, in comments made alongside de Moore's, says for a fledgling AFL outfit that is trying to establish roots in Sydney's west, Tom Wills is the kind of figure that can be brandished to give a new club a sense of history.

"Sport is all about bragging rights, so people can turn the historic Tom Wills family connection to their advantage," Rowe suggests."

"Sometimes being fresh and new can be used to advantage as well - but that can only get you so far."

Resorting to reinventing history, ignoring other influences, while talking up rickety cultural connections, won't get you far either.

* Tom Wills never lived in (what is now) Sydney's western suburbs. Wills was born in 1835 at "Molongolo Plains" in southern NSW (near present day Queanbeyan and the ACT). Five years later (1840) the Wills family moved to western Victoria.

** Over recent years the "laying claim" to Tom Wills has occured in Parramatta [UWS], Canberra [The Canberra Times], Moyston [The Herald-Sun] and Geelong [Geelong Advertiser]. This is despite the AFL down-playing the role that Wills played in the creation of the code: Andrew Demetriou (AFL) wrote in the introduction to the AFL's 150 years book that "Our game does not belong to an idea by Tom Wills..." [link]. See also "No, We Shall Have a Game of Our Own" on Wills' involvement in the Melbourne FC and its first rules.