1858
An Australian Rules Sherrin
A game of our own
As anyone from Melbourne will gleefully tell you, Australian Rules is the oldest football code in the world. Originally made from leather, the Sherrin is the most Australian of sporting objects. It’s named after Thomas William Sherrin, who in 1880 recast a misshapen rugby ball with pointed ends, to aid the bounce. Sherrin started manufacturing the balls – which were ideal for Australian Rules – in a Collingwood factory in 1897. Sherrin is now the generic name of an Australian Rules ball.
In the middle of the 18th century there were many different types of football being played, with rules transmitted by custom and word of mouth or improvised on the spot. It would be some years before the games we now know as Rugby and soccer were codified.
On 7 August 1858, Melbourne Grammar School met Scotch College at Richmond Paddock in Yarra Park. The teams were 40 players per side and the match was played over three Saturdays (7 and 21 August and 4 September). The ball was round. The distance between the goals was half a mile (800 m) and the first team to score two goals would be the winner. Over the three sessions each side scored one goal, making the match a draw. Tom Wills, one of the organisers, umpired.
There are rules to Australian Rules – initially just 10 of them, which were drawn up in a pub. On 17 May 1859, Wills, J B Thompson, William Hammersley and Thomas Smith – a group of semi-professional sportsmen – met in a back room of the Parade Hotel in Melbourne and, at the suggestion of the Melbourne Cricket Club, drew up the rules of the new game.
Wills is the most interesting sportsman the country has ever produced. He grew up mostly in the Western District of Victoria. At age 14 he was sent to Rugby School in England, where he excelled at cricket but also played Rugby. His cricket style was considered unorthodox or perhaps untrained: he was known for going for wild shots and was a fearsome bowler. After school he went up to Cambridge and continued to play cricket. He returned to Australia in 1856.
On 10 July 1958, Wills wrote a letter to Bell’s Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle suggesting that a game be devised that would keep cricketers fit in the off-season. A number of different games involving footballs were then being played, and it was really Wills organising a meeting – which included two journalists – and codifying some rules that established Australian Rules as the game it is. The original rules drew on the games played at British public schools Winchester, Harrow and Rugby, and included the distinctive features of the Australian game: no tripping or ‘hacking’ (kicking a player in the shins), no ‘off-side’ rule, the ‘mark’, and carrying the ball only as far as was needed to kick it.
Also at that meeting was Wills’ brother-in-law, Henry Harrison. A champion ‘pedestrian’ and a public servant, Harrison brought the qualities of an ordered mind and a love of raw competition to the establishment of this ‘game of our own’ – as he said his brother-in-law called it. In 1866, Harrison further codified the rules of Victorian football.
Australian Rules really is a game of our own. It has influences from Gaelic football and from Rugby and possibly from Indigenous games that were observed and played around the colony. Great debates rage about its origin, but given that the actual written records of its founders say nothing on this issue, they are just speculation. It’s likely that if Wills was influenced by the Aboriginal game of marngrook he would have said or written something about it.
As historian Geoffrey Blainey has observed, a player with a new technique often changes the game – and undoubtedly that occurred in the early days of Australian Rules. Neither Wills nor anyone else wrote that they wanted to create a version of an existing game. Rather, their impulse was to create something that was native to Australia.
The prosperity brought about by Victoria’s gold rush was one factor in the success of Australian Rules. The new prosperity allowed for some relaxation of working hours. The half-day holiday on Saturday created scope for greater leisure activities, and Australian Rules naturally filled that gap. The economy was transforming Melbourne in the late 19th century and each region of the city was growing and creating its identity. Nothing better expressed the identity of a new district than having a football team. As Victoria prospered so did its native sport, and the two became entwined. During the 1870s, more than 125 clubs appeared in Melbourne and another 60 senior clubs were established elsewhere in Victoria.
The game itself was never static. In 1865 it was established that the player with the ball had to bounce it off the turf at least every 10 m. By 1874 players no longer scored by carrying the ball between goal posts, but by kicking it through them. From the 1880s the practice of the spectacular mark – a high jump to catch the ball – became a feature of the game. And in 1897 the behind, worth one point, came in. The Grand Final was first contested in 1898, and in 1904 it was held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the first time – and it is still held there every year. Throughout, the Sherrin ball remained a constant.