I made it back safe and sound from my trip to America, there were one or two little hiccoughs but we can discuss them in a later article.
This month we are going to talk about something of far more earth shattering importance than mere overseas travel. Are you ready for it? We are going to talk FOOTBALL. Not any old kind of football but the ONLY kind of football, Australian Rules Football or as it is affectionately referred to Aussie Rules or AFL .
Okay so I can hear you all yelling from here, "What is Aussie Rules, we have NEVER heard of it". Ah but then you are not an Aussie are you. Here in Australia football is no mere game or sporting event it is religion. Particularly in Victoria. Yes we play other codes of football here in Oz. We play Soccer, Rugby League and Rugby Union, there is even some Gaelic football played and a few clubs who devote themselves to American Gridiron but it is Aussie Rules that takes the country by storm and in every office around Victoria, in particular, the ONLY topic of conversation on Monday mornings is a blow by blow dissection of the weekend games. This is mainly a male preoccupation, although I know a number of women who could hold their own in these conversations, who know every player and how good he is. They can tell you as well as the next bloke, where their side was "let down" and who should have been out or who should have been playing on whom........I am NOT one of them. However during the winter unless you live like a hermit, football is pretty hard to get away from.
The Australian Football League (AFL was formerly known as the Victorian Football League (VFL) and was a mainly Victorian competition.It oficially started in 1877 as a competition called the Victorian Football Association (VFA) with the first game played betweencurrent AFL teams, Carlton and Melbourne. In 1987 The powers that be decided that if our great game was to continue to be great then it needed new blood and it was decided to take the league national. One or two Victorian teams migrated to other states, for example South Melbourne became the Sydney Swans and the Fitzroy Lions moved to Queensland to become the Brisbane Lions. Both these clubs were suffering financial woes and it was decided that in order for them to continue their future lay interstate. Then some new teams were added to the League, two in South Australia and another two in Western Australia. The League went from 12 teams to 16 and the fanaticism spread out from Victoria to encompass four other states. Some of the states already played their own state competition of Aussie Rules but for both New South Wales and Queensland this was a whole new ball game and for the first few years apart from expatriate Victorians it was hard to lure fans away from the two codes of Rugby that held sway in these two states.
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Kath Hobson's Australia/South Pacific topic, please visit the Discussions page.