Devaney's legacy continues to grow
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In the 160 years since the game of Australian football was born, there have been some remarkable stories. Many are the stuff of legend, oft-repeated and well-known. The sad story of Tom Wills, the game's founding father; the birth of modern coaching through Carlton's Jack Worrall; Collingwood's still unmatched four flags in a row, the superstar full forwards like John Coleman and Tony Lockett; coaching greats such as Jock McHale and Norm Smith.
These stories are the stuff of legend, recitable by those who know their footy history, and familiar even to those who have only a passing interest in the game. But many of these legends are 'Victoria-centric', weighted heavily towards the stars and stories of football in Melbourne and surrounds. It is rather less often that followers of the modern AFL hear of Fos Williams' incredible coaching feats and Port Adelaide's unparallelled number of premierships. This is understandable, to a degree. The game of Australian football was, after all, born in Victoria, and the code's national league, the AFL, grew out of the Victorian Football League in the 1980s.
History is written by the victors, goes the old adage. And in a very real sense, Victoria were the winners in a 'cold war' between the three mainland Australian football states waged from the middle of the 20th century. In The Stolen Dream, John Devaney argues that the Victorian Football League was determined to wrest control and destiny of the code from the other states:
"Whereas the VFL had initially been the first among equals, it gradually assumed the role of the sole and undisputed guardian of the code."
As a result, football's past is now viewed through the AFL's peculiar historical lens, and it is not necessariy a true reflection of events. In the case of the Australian game, the past has been documented far too often from the Victorian perspective. Devaney, the author of the 'prequel' to The Stolen Dream, titled A Far Off Land, has spent much of his life addressing and redressing this imbalance.
The majority of the words on this website belong to Devaney, but although he handed over the ownership baton of australianfootball.com (previously Full Points Footy) in 2012, he has not lost his passion for writing about the game and its history.
A Far Off Land and The Stolen Dream represent the latest examples of that, and they are a welcome addition to the expanding, but still too small, body of work devoted to the era of the sport that came before television and other modern media.
A Far Off Land focusses on Australia's first 25 years as a nation, and the context of football as part of the country navigating its fledgling years of nationhood. The birth of the Commonwealth of Australia formalised six colonies as states, and as a result, "interstate football" was born, as Devaney describes:
"Among those half a dozen states were the former colonies of Victoria and South Australia, which meant that when the two confronted one another on the football field on 15th June 1901, it was, in effect, the first ever interstate football match."
The match, played at the MCG, was won by Victoria, but the score, Victoria 8.7 (55) d South Australia 4.16 (40) suggests there was little or no difference between the two sides in ability. As Devaney points out, this view was reinforced by the match reports of the time. To further back up the parity of football in the states, Devaney cites results between SAFA sides of the 1880s and visiting VFA teams. For example,
"For many seasons, Norwood would prove itself the equal of the Victorians. In 1883, for example, it defeated the powerful Essendon combination by 5 goals to 1 at Kensington Oval, while five years later, much more famously, it overcame VFA premier South Melbourne, again at Kensington, in a three game ‘Test’ series which had been arranged to decide the champion of Australia."
This is not to say that Devaney's sole focus is to tell the South Australian and Western Australian side of football in opposition to the Victorian narrative. Rather, Devaney's aim is to provide a perspective of the seasons from 1901 to 1925 of each of the three mainland Australian football states, individually and collectively, from a viewpoint of the three being on an equal footing.
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In The Stolen Dream, Devaney does the same for the 36-year period beginning in 1951. The book's final season, 1986, marked in a sense the last "true" year of the VFL as a state competition. Though the league had transplanted the financially destitute South Melbourne to Sydney four years earlier, the inclusion of start-up clubs West Coast and the Brisbane Bears in 1987 represented a shift towards a national competition, even if it was to be three more years before the Victorian Football League became the Australian Football League to reflect that change.
Both A Far Off Land and The Stolen Dream are very lengthy. Between the two, they fill more than 1100 pages. But this is not a weakness; it is very much a strength. To do justice to two tales of football that cover 61 seasons between them, scenes must be set, and individual stories fleshed out. Devaney manages to do this without being too heavy on detail.
A feature of A Far Off Land is a series of break-out mini-articles sprinkled throughout the book, which come under the umbrella title of 'Flick Passes'. These add a nice extra dimension, and The Stolen Dream could perhaps have benefited from something similar.
Neither A Far Off Land nor The Stolen Dream could be read in a single sitting, and they are not designed to be. They can each be read over a period of time, allowing the reader to enrich their knowledge of the development of the game since nationhood was established. The two also serve as valuable reference works for those exploring a specific period in the game's history.
For those looking to expand their knowledge of Australian football's evolution, these books are highly recommended. For those wanting to attain a comprehensive understanding of the game and its relationship to the Australian states, A Far Off Land and The Stolen Dream are a must.
A Far Off Land is available via Lulu. Click here to order.
The Stolen Dream is also available via Lulu. Click here to order.
You can read about John Devaney's remarkable football story in Footy's Prolific Pom, by Charles Happell.
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