Guest Speaker - Gillian Hibbins

Historian Gillian Hibbins said football had always  been around wherever there were feet and some sort of ball. It stretches  back for centuries and all around the world. There was little football in the 1840s although we did celebrate the Port Phillip District becoming the Colony of Victoria in 1850.

The gold rushes brought thousands of young men to the colony of Victoria in the 1850s, many of whom must have had experience of football in England where games were played but only with rules agreed before each game. The schools started to play occasional games. It was the publican at the hotel in Wellington Parade, Jerry Bryant, who provided a football and inspired six pick-up games played in the spring of 1858 near the MCG. These were chaotic and it was agreed that rules were necessary.

At the start of the winter in 1859 about fifty young men formed the Melbourne Football Club, and three days afterwards at the Parade Hotel, on 17 May, a committee of four wrote 10 rules which formed the basis for the code we now have. They were journalists James Thompson and William Hammersley, who had been at Cambridge University, teacher Tom Smith, who had attended Dublin University and young cricketer Tom Wills who was keen to introduce Rugby School football which he had learnt in England. But the older men were not keen on Rugby School’s rough play or offside rules. Ultimately they settled on rules which suited Victoria’s dry conditions and the two journalists were significant in propagating these and getting them widely accepted. 
There is no evidence to date that the different games of indigenous football which had been played around Victoria had an influence on the choice of these early rules.  Later Jill said she wished she had said that Australian Football Rules are the oldest continuous code in the world, soccer being codified in 1863 and rugby in 1871. Something to be proud of!