Vale John Devaney
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It is with great shock and sadness that we at australianfootball.com learned of the sudden passing this week of John Devaney. A prolific football writer, John founded Full Points Footy, the precursor to this website. Hundreds of thousands of John's words appear on these pages, and the breadth of his knowledge of the history of Australian game was arguably unparalleled.
John was an active contributor to australianfootball.com even as late as last week. He has had a profoundly positive effect on the football writing community and provided an invaluable resource for football historians across the nation. His achievements are all the more remarkable for the fact that he spent the last half-century of his life based in the UK.
In 2013, football journalist Charles Happell profiled the man whose name is known by too few. Following is the John Devaney story, as told by Charles in 2013.
All of us at australianfootball.com pass on our deep condolences to John's family and friends.
Andrew Gigacz
Footy's prolific Pom
The most prolific and passionate chronicler of Australia's native football code, whose word count now stands at 2,800,000 (give or take a thousand), lives not in Launceston, Lancelin, Langwarrin or Langhorne Creek but the heart of verdant Lincolnshire.
As in the county on England's east coast, birthplace of Margaret Thatcher and Sir Isaac Newton, and home of Bateman's Good Honest Ales and third-division Scunthorpe United FC.
John Devaney works from an office at home which he says is about “two Billy Barrot drop kicks” from the historic and impressive medieval pile, Lincoln Cathedral. The “BBDK” is a unit of measurement foreign to just about every Lincolner, but one he uses to Australians who might remember the great Richmond centreman of the 1960s and understand immediately that the reference equates to about 100 metres.
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And it is here that Devaney tends to his obsession most days: writing about Australian football. This week, he was busy piecing together reviews of the 1911 VFA Final and Grand Final between Essendon Association and Brunswick, a companion piece to a review he had already written about the 1911 VFL Grand Final between Essendon and Collingwood. (Sensing my puzzlement at the other end of the phone, he quickly explains: “The chief point of interest, of course, lies in the fact that Essendon triumphed in both VFL and VFA, a feat the respective clubs were to repeat the following year.” Ah, yes, of course.)
It's this jarring juxtaposition which is difficult to get your head around. Here is a 56-year-old man, who spent precisely seven years of his life in Australia – the last of them in 1970 – sitting in an office in Lincoln, churning out reams of copy about football clubs and leagues dotted around a sunburnt land 17,000 kilometres away.
At last count, Devaney had catalogued 1194 clubs, from Aberfeldie in Victoria to the Zillmere Eagles in Queensland, and 3108 player and coach biographies. They appear on his website – called Full Points Footy before its sale last year; reincarnated now as australianfootball.com - and six bound, self-published books.
His wife, Laura, shies away from calling him potty or barmy or even eccentric. She prefers “idiosyncratic”.
The story of how Devaney came to be Australian football's greatest archivist and chronicler – and that's no idle claim because his body of work is truly in a league of its own - is a true epic.
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His determination and single-mindedness in tackling the daunting task of cataloguing the Australian game's myriad leagues and clubs is redolent (in a way) of the American army surgeon Dr W C Minor, better known as the Surgeon of Crowthorne in Simon Winchester 's book of the same name. Dr Minor spent most of his life in a Victorian asylum for the criminally insane but played a fundamental role in the making of the first Oxford English Dictionary by becoming its main volunteer contributor.
Devaney understandably baulks at the comparison, saying he's quite sane, thank you very much. But he acknowledges the oddness of the situation, and the relentless fervour with which he's attacked his project. “It's been a pseudo-religious passion, it's been my life really,” he says from Lincoln. “It must seem very strange and odd, to Australians in particular – maybe incongruous is the best word – but there you go, that's life, isn't it?”
The Devaney back story starts in 1963 when his parents moved to Adelaide from Liverpool and he, a six-year-old boy in shorts pants, realised he'd have to find a new sport to follow after discovering no-one at his primary school had heard of Everton Football Club, the team he supported back home.
So he was introduced to the local code, first by kicking a mate's plastic footy and then attending South Australian league matches with his equally curious father.
An early memory is South Australia's rare and much-celebrated triumph over Victoria – at the MCG – in 1963. Sixteen months later, his father took him to the Adelaide Oval for the SANFL grand final between Port Adelaide and Sturt, a match that drew 62,543 spectators, so many in fact that the young Devaney recalls seeing almost nothing of the game.
But a seed was sown. Something in this new, athletic and wildly chaotic game struck a chord within him.
His Eureka Moment, as he calls it, came on July 1, 1967 when, by himself, he attended an interstate match between South Australia and the arch-enemy, Victoria, at the Adelaide Oval. He watched, enchanted, as these powerful yet balletic athletes played the sport in a way he'd never seen before.
“It wasn't a full-blown love affair until I saw that game. I actually went to it by myself as a 10-year-old and it was the first time I stood and watched and studied a game quite closely. It was a great match as well. It would probably look pretty ramshackle now but at the time it was the pinnacle of the game.
“The intensity of the game was one thing I remember: both teams were absolutely desperate to win. And the skill level was something to behold, too.
"Billy Barrot was playing in the centre for Victoria and was one of the best players. Royce Hart was playing, too – he was a youngster then and might even have been in his first season of senior football. His one-on-one battle with the South Australian full-back was fascinating to watch. I played full-forward for the school team so I was intrigued by the strategy side of the game, as well.”
Even though the Vics squeaked home by less than a goal, the young Devaney was so entranced by what he'd seen he rushed home to watch the replay. “From that day on, footy was forever transformed from being merely my favourite sport to something more akin to a religion,” he said.
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He chose the Port Magpies as his team, began writing up match reports when at school and can remember doing a 5,000-word school project in the first year of high school, 1969, complete with hand-drawn illustrations, which was grandly titled The History of Australian Football.
But his mother and father made the heartbreaking (for him) decision to leave Australia in 1970, when he was 13, and head back to the UK. He'd been in the country for barely seven years but that time left such an indelible mark on him it was to shape much of the rest of his life.
“Although several of the friendships which commenced during my time in Australia have endured for more than four decades since, and I have revisited the country a number of times, I have never been able to call the land I love more than any other 'home',” he said.
Back in England, Devaney started a file with sections for each footy club in Australia and he kept abreast of the game by subscribing to publications such as “Football Life”, “The SA Football Budget” and “Football Records”. He also sent off for annual reports from clubs and leagues in all states, making sure his focus was never restricted to just South Australia or Victoria. Later, he'd buy every book published about the native game, from remainder-bin player memoirs to serious histories.
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He wrote his own novel about his emerging love affair with football, titled All My Most Memorable Times Have Been Imagined, and in 1989 was a pivotal figure in the establishment of the British Australian Rules Football League. Dismayed by BARFL's original plans only to field teams from London, Devaney made a compelling case for a club north of Watford gap to be included and that club – the East Midland Eagles, based in Leicester – duly took its place in the league's debut season in 1990. Devaney was in his element: he served as player, president, club historian and league historian for seven seasons.
It wasn't until the late 1990s that he began thinking about collating all this information he'd gathered into something more permanent and substantial: an encyclopaedia of Australian football clubs.
That idea eventually morphed into the establishment of a website, fullpointsfooty.com.au, which went live in 2001, and the publication of six bound volumes of books, the first one of which appeared in 2007.
The clubs range from the obvious and mega-successful – Collingwood, West Coast, Port Adelaide and so on – down to the two-men-and-a-dog, speck-on-the-map type outfit. But all are accorded the same care and attention to detail.
Take, for example, Devaney's entry for tiny Mole Creek in Tasmania's Leven Football Association: “Details of Mole Creek's early history are scant but the club is known to have won the inaugural premiership of the Chudleigh Football Association in 1920. Between 1950 and 1983 the club competed in the Deloraine Football Association, claiming a competition record twelve senior grade flags. In recent years the Bulldogs have been highly successful participants in the Leven Football Association contesting each of the last six grand finals for wins in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2009. The 2009 grand final clash with Railton was a nail-biting affair in which Paul Hampton kicked his seventh goal seconds before the final siren to give Mole Creek victory by a single straight kick, 18.10 (118) to 17.10 (112).”
At the other end of the country, his entry for Tapalinga in the Northern Territory reads : “The Super Stars have won eleven senior grade flags from seventeen grand finals, making them the Tiwi Islands Football League's second most successful club, after Imalu. However, Tapalinga can point with satisfaction to triumphs over Imalu in each of the last two senior grade grand finals.”
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Similarly with the player profiles. He's catalogued all the obvious ones: Whitten, Matthews, Robran, Blight, Cable, Farmer, Baldock and so on. But he's also given due recognition to forgotten champions of a bygone age such as Horrie Clover, Vic Thorp, Harold Rumney and Fred Baring who are written about with a loving hand and great attention to detail.
Not even the most ardent and knowledgeable footy fan could tell that these biographies and club histories were written by an Englishman living in the shadows of Lincoln Cathedral, whose brief sojourn in this country ended in 1970. They carry the ring of authenticity; here's someone who knows and loves the game.
“I would be confident in claiming to have written somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million words about Australian football since the turn of the century,” Devaney said, when pressed about his word count. “I know I've written an awful lot, there's a fair bit there.”
It seems remarkable that he's never heard from anyone at the AFL about his project – to inquire, congratulate or offer assistance. You might have thought the 20-odd years he's devoted to charting the Australian game would have earned some sort of recognition, maybe even a gong, but Devaney beavers away in his Lincoln study unconcerned by the absence of any official affirmation or accolade.
Often, he has to explain to new acquaintances about what he does for a living – as it happens, he writes and looks after his ailing wife full-time for which he collects a carer's allowance – and sometimes notices them backing away slightly as he explains his 49-year labour of love.
Then there are the times when he gets chatting to Lincoln locals and the conversation turns to the Australian game. When he got talking to two sports-mad Englishmen at his local pub last week, they genuinely and resolutely believed Australian football was known as 'gridiron' and was played by men in helmets and assorted body armour.
“While I was eventually successful in disabusing them of this impression, I was quite unable to implant a more satisfactory image of the sport in their minds, for the simple reason that neither of them had ever seen it played,” Devaney said. “And as every true aficionado of Australian football knows, there are no other forms of sporting endeavour which are even remotely comparable to 'God's Own Game'.”
One constant theme that runs through Devaney's work is not just his affection for the sport but his antipathy towards the body known as the AFL, and the Victorian-centric way in which it has sought to commandeer the code. He hates, for example, any reference to amateur, country and suburban footballers playing “AFL”. No they're not, Devaney says, they're playing Australian football.
In describing the rich and successful history of Tasmanian club, Cananore, for example, Devaney notes acerbically: “These achievements alone should be sufficient to earn the Canaries a prominent place in any objectively selected football 'Hall of Fame', but the sad reality is that, with football outside the AFL-VFL behemoth being accorded less and less value and credence with each passing year, it is not likely to be very long before Cananore's highly laudable legacy disappears without trace.”
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In fact, so sorely was Devaney's loyalty tested in 1977, the year the VFL “sabotaged” the National Football League's nascent attempts to develop an Australia-wide competition by withdrawing its support and setting up its own rival tournament, he gave the game away altogether. That meant for three years disentangling himself emotionally from the sport, and trying to purge it from his system.
Only when, perchance, he flicked on the television in September 1980 and saw the Kevin Bartlett-led Richmond side completely dismantle Collingwood in the Grand Final did footy once again regain its hold on the Englishman. “Whatever the rights and wrongs of the VFL's attempts to take control of football, the game itself ... remained unsurpassed in terms of its sheer skill, athleticism and physical toughness, while its spectacular elements were completely unique,” he said.
Unable to afford pay television, Devaney these days gets his fill of Australian football via the internet, making a special effort to tune into the Port Adelaide games. He has been back to Australia several times in the past 42 years, his father having relocated to Tasmania in retirement, and his passion for the country shows no sign of diminishing. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the family's journey to Adelaide from Liverpool, and his fateful introduction to Australian football.
Devaney says he likes the modern game but perhaps not as much as the idealised game of his youth. He thinks it's become slightly homogenous in that every team at AFL level plays a similar style. He also can't abide contrivances such as the nine-point goals which have been introduced recently in the pre-season competition - an Americanisation, he feels, which the game can do without.
“That just mirrors basketball, doesn't it, when you get three points for shooting outside the ring. I just don't see the point in that. I think Australian football should play to its strengths. And its strengths are unique and inherent in the game as it is. It doesn't need to borrow from other sports. I think that diminishes it, personally.
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“So my love affair with Australian football continues as intense and obsessive as ever, albeit without certain frustrations. In particular the administration of the game, particularly at the top level, continues to irritate and sometimes bemuse me. Despite its name, it seems clear to me the Australian Football League has failed to disentangle itself from its Victorian roots, with those in control harbouring certain assumptions about the game and its history which continue to stymie development.
“I also find it's become quite homogenous. Players all play much the same way; there's not those distinct styles there once was. The variability and contrasting styles - that was part of the charm for me, as with that state game in 1967. If you half close your eyes when you're watching the television now it could be any two teams out there playing.
“Still, I don't want to give the impression that I've fallen out of love, as it were. Let's say the marriage is going through a slightly rocky period. But we'll survive.
“I will enjoy those aspects of the game which still beguile, thrill and excite and cope as best I can with the feelings of estrangement evoked by my misfortune in living on the opposite side of the globe from the epicentre of the finest sporting action on the planet.”
And with that, Devaney excuses himself to put the finishing touches to his essay on the 1911 VFA Final and, of course, the equally notable Grand Final, his word-count inching its way towards three million.
This article first appeared at backpagelead.com.au.
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