In the beginning
When and where association football began in Australia is still a mystery. Varieties of football were being played frequently in Melbourne and Victoria almost from the first arrival of overseas migrants in the area. Colonial newspapers are littered with references to football prior to the 1850s. Ball games were played on the goldfields and no doubt many immigrants arrived off ships carrying a ball with which to play.
In Scotland and England it is clear that small-sided games with agreed rules were being played long before the setting up of the Football Association in 1863. What is now also clear is that similar games were being played in Australia before members of the Melbourne club drew up its rules in 1859 for what eventually became Australian Rules football. The notices for many of these early games referred explicitly to English, Irish and Scottish practice.
In Geelong in November 1850, a three-day athletic festival included a six-a-side football match, also for a wager. It is likely that this was closer to what became Association Football than Australian Rules as it evolved in the next decade, but it is hard to be certain.
The game of football came next, Mr Hobson being the umpire on one side and Mr M'Gillivray on the other. There were six players on each side. The arena was the cricket ground in the centre of which the ball was placed and the players stood facing each other at opposite angles of the ground. As the play proceeded, it looked 10 to 1 in favour of Mr Hobson’s side, but one of M'Gillivray's party happened to give the ball a turn, it was taken up by Giles, another of M'Gillivray's players, who managed to kick it through the proper panel, and so won the game. Prize - £3, entrance 3s.
The St Patrick's Day games of 1856 in Melbourne had a football match as well as wrestling and athletics. The football match offered a prize of £20 against an entry fee of 5 shillings, with the note that the prizes would be increased if funds permitted. Gillian Hibbins has drawn attention to numerous other football games in Melbourne, Castlemaine and the diggings around Ballarat.
A couple of years after the foundation of the Melbourne and Geelong Australian Rules football clubs, the Warrnambool Examiner reported that:
There is every prospect of the good old English game of football becoming quite a popular institution in this District during the winter time. On Saturday last there were about twenty players assembled on the cricket ground, and away they went to work kicking with all their might. Unfortunately, however, but two goals had been attained, before bang burst the ball, and as no substitute could be obtained, the players were obliged to give up just as they were getting nicely warmed to their work. The meeting ultimately resulted in the formation of a football club, entry, etc. Twenty-four members joined and the following officers were appointed. President, Frank Frost; Vice-President, Richard Osbourne; Hon secretary and Treasurer, J Matson. The club will meet for exercise on the cricket ground every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon and a supply of bladders will always be ready, in order that the game may proceed. We understand there are three matches already on the tapis, viz, Town and Country, Volunteers and Civilians and the Married and Single.
The original advertisement had been for a three-a-side game, but in the event it was about ten per side when the match took place.
A number of references recently unearthed suggest that kicking as opposed to handling games were occasionally played and sometimes advocated in the 1860s and 1870s, and there is strong evidence that organised association football was played between New Town Football Club and the Cricketers of Hobart in May and June 1879.
Football was not confined to Victoria. Soldiers played football in Sydney in 1829 and there was a later Queen’s Birthday match. Football and cricket matches for prizes in Hyde Park in Sydney were reported in the Port Philip Herald in December 1855. The authors have collected multiple references to football in advertisements, reports and letters and literary contributions to newspapers across Australia from the second decade of the nineteenth century onwards.
So what were clearly seen as small-sided, rule-bounded games of football for monetary prizes were quite common in Australia well before the setting up of the Football Association in England and three decades before what some regard as the first match under Association Football Rules in Sydney in the 1880s. Unfortunately, the names and the backgrounds of most of the pioneers of football in the 1850s remain unknown, but the existing evidence is enough to show that the first generations of migrants to Australia had brought their various forms of football to their new country, and this reinforces the modern view that football survived and was flourishing in the United Kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century throughout the country and not only in the English public schools. Brendan Murphy goes further and argues that Henry Creswick, who played cricket in Victoria in 1857–58, may have brought the rules of the Sheffield Football Club to Melbourne, and thus influenced the rules committee of 1859, but since he left England in 1840 at the age of 16 this is unlikely. There is even an outside possibility of a reverse flow from Melbourne to London.
Indeed 'a game resembling football' is a way to describe the very first example of the Melbourne Rules laid down in 1859, as this letter from 'Free Kick' to Bell's Life in Victoria in 1864 attests:
The [English] Football Association was accordingly formed, and a set of rules drawn up, which by a very curious coincidence, are very nearly similar to those which were decided on at a meeting of representatives of football clubs, held at the Parade Hotel, near Melbourne, some 5 years ago... Whether a stray copy (for the rules were neatly printed and got up) ever found its way home I do not know, but if not it is a strong argument in favour of our own code, that the football parliaments assembled on opposite sides of the globe, should bring the identical same result of their labours.
No matter what present day critics and historians might say on the issue, as far as ‘Free Kick’ is concerned, the similarities between Association football and Australian Rules football in 1864 were far more significant than the differences. Games resembling Association football have been played in Australia for as long as any other code of football.