Australian Football

Throughout his 18-season, 371-game league career Mel Whinnen’s name was synonymous with both fair play and brilliance, the dual attributes which inform the voting for most of the top awards in Australian football. Given this, it is somewhat ironic that, although he came close several times,¹ he never once landed the supreme individual honour in Western Australian football, the Sandover Medal. He more than compensated for this, however, by winning West Perth’s club champion award, the Breckler Medal, a record nine times, emphasising that he was not merely brilliant, but consistently so.

Indeed, it was arguably the fact that Whinnen could invariably be relied upon to perform at or near his best that distinguished him from the comparatively large group of players who warrant the description ‘good’, and made him instead a bona fide champion.

Whinnen was fortunate enough to play in a premiership in his very first season with the Cardinals, coming on as 19th man for Don Marinko in a 32-point win over arch rivals East Perth. His contributions to West Perth’s victorious Grand Final teams of 1969 and 1971 were somewhat more noteworthy, while in the 1975 Grand Final, nearing the end of his career, he was awarded the Simpson Medal for best afield in the Cardinals’ 104-point annihilation of South Fremantle.

Always a sublimely elegant footballer, it was perhaps appropriate when, in 1976, Whinnen became one of a select band of players to be awarded an MBE. He retired a year later after West Perth lost the 1977 Preliminary Final to East Fremantle. It is doubtful if Leederville was ever home to a more prodigious or engaging talent.

Whinnen's contribution to the game was acknowledged in 2018 when he was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.

Author - John Devaney, with updates by Andrew Gigacz