Tasmania and the AFL
The capacity of little Tasmania to achieve big things in the field of sport is unquestionable. From once being known almost exclusively for its footballers, it has over the last 30 years achieved unsung, but extraordinary, advances on the international stage.
Much of this derives from the establishment of its state sports institute in 1985 and, prior to that, its admission to cricket’s Sheffield Shield in 1977. Over the last 20 years, Tasmania has produced a number of Olympic and World champions in rowing and cycling, and made a strong contribution to national men’s hockey teams. It now provides a steady supply of international cricketers, including one – Ricky Ponting – who is these days spoken of as second-to-Bradman among Australian batting greats. It’s arguable that over the past decade the state has become the pace-setter in Australian domestic cricket.
And if one Tasmanian sportsman were to be identified as emblematic of a small entity punching above its weight, he would have to be world middleweight boxing champion, Daniel Geale.
The great oddity in all this is that the sport Tasmanians regard as their traditional and natural game, the indigenous code of football, has been the big loser. As other sports have progressed, football on the island has – by virtually every objective measure – gone backwards.
In a nutshell, this is because the state has been swamped by the AFL’s wave of popularity but excluded from participation. While Tasmania’s local football has been buried under the avalanche, local patrons are given four games a year in Launceston and – from this year – two in Hobart, played by Hawthorn and North Melbourne. That’s a total of six games across the state, with the “home” teams coming from suburban Melbourne.
Back in the days when Tasmanians followed their three regional football competitions with a passion, there were ten games played across the three major population zones every Saturday. And when young Tasmanians could watch their heroes on a local stage weekly, their efforts to emulate them were spectacularly fruitful. The state became a veritable football factory.
Verdun Howell (pictured), who was beaten on a count-back by Bob Skilton for the 1959 Brownlow Medal, was the first to put his name in lights. On his heels came Bob “Tassie” Johnson, Darrel Baldock, Ian Stewart, Peter Hudson, Royce Hart, Barry Lawrence, Brent Crosswell, and John Greening.
These products of late-1950s and ’60s Tasmanian football all became huge stars in Victoria. Baldock, Stewart, and Hudson are Legends in the Australian Football Hall of Fame. Currently, Tasmania has produced more formalised legends than Western Australia and South Australia put together.
This was also the period in which Tasmania’s state teams reached a zenith of competitiveness. In those days, quadrennial national carnivals were the code’s showpiece: something akin to football’s Olympic Games and regarded as the ultimate test of each state’s strength. The carnivals were played without state-of-origin rules, something Tasmanians used to haplessly bemoan. When Hobart was the host in 1966, Baldock (deputising for an injured Ken Fraser) captained Victoria to national supremacy. Inevitably, its unbeaten series included a merciless drubbing of the Doc’s native state.
In the second half of the ’50s, Tasmania beat South Australia at consecutive carnivals. At the event held to celebrate the game’s centenary, in Melbourne in 1958, the islanders also downed Western Australia. This was arguably Tasmania’s high-water mark, although the legendary win over a second Victorian eighteen – at York Park in 1960 – is more famous. If state-of-origin rules had applied in those days, the smallest state could conceivably have been second ranked in the nation for a time.
As it was, the flow of players to the VFL was just beginning. The arrival of television brought replays of the big league to the other side of Bass Strait. Tasmanians could now see better footy on their screens each week, with huge and atmospheric crowds. For young players with the aptitude to aim for the big time this was seductive enough; financial incentives – modest as they were by today’s standards – made the lure irresistible.
Before TV, home-grown Tassie champions like Geoff Long, Don Gale (father of Michael and Brendon), and Barry Strange – who won All-Australian blazers in the 1950s – stayed home. So did other local heroes such as Rex Garwood, Neil Conlan (father of Michael), Trevor Leo, and Garth Smith.
By the mid-1960s, Tasmanian football administrators were helpless to resist a surging tide. Whereas Baldock had given patrons in his home state seven seasons of his genius before heading to St Kilda, and Hudson provided New Norfolk fans with four years of plenty before becoming a Hawk, things were changing fast. Ian Stewart had played a mere handful of senior games for Hobart before joining St Kilda at 18; Brent Crosswell went to Carlton straight from Launceston’s Scotch College. Likewise, John Greening left for Collingwood upon leaving school in Burnie, while – in the early-’70s – Michael Roach gave Longford one season as a 17 year-old before heading for Punt Rd.
Tasmanian football was now giving up its best having enjoyed barely a glimpse of their talents. The spectacle available to local fans was thus denuded, delivering an implicit but unmistakeable message that the game on television was not only superior, but becoming increasingly so. The three vibrant regional competitions of the great years were dying. What was on offer was second-tier and sliding and the crowds steadily lost interest.
By the early-1980s, an attempt was made to revitalise local football by forming a state-wide league. It was a worthy objective but the genie was long out of the bottle. Later in the same decade, the VFL (soon-to-be AFL) enshrined the process of taking Tasmania’s best straight from the football cradle via a national draft. No longer was there any pretence that the smallest state was other than a feeding ground.
Such disenfranchisement, though, wasn’t without a cost to the superpower. Tasmanian kids were no longer being touched by the experience of going to games and seeing heroes in the flesh. The state now had a Sheffield Shield cricket team giving young Tasmanians the chance to represent their state. The TIS provided options for the development of elite athletes in other sports. All this without the certainty of having to leave home at a young age. The production line of football champions slowed.
The case of new Australian ’keeper, Matthew Wade, is instructive. His father, Scott, was a star Tasmanian footballer who spent two years at Hawthorn in the early-1980s and is now CEO of AFL Tasmania. Matthew was an outstanding football talent who might have made it to the AFL had he not remained equivocal over which sport to choose. Cricket became his game.
This would never have happened prior to 1980. Even Max Walker, a highly successful international cricketer in the ’70s, initially left Tasmania to play football. Cricket was his second sporting vocation and flowered only after the winter game’s possibilities had been exhausted over six years.
Now, those of a vintage to have enjoyed Tasmania’s fertile football years can only watch in dismay as the state is parasitically fed off by Victorian clubs. Five years after narrowly staving off a merger with Melbourne, Hawthorn saw the potential in the football-starved island which has helped it become a financial behemoth. More recently, North Melbourne sensed an opportunity to retain its Victorian identity by clutching at the small state’s southern half.
The sight of a club from Melbourne’s eastern suburbs wearing on its jumper the name “Tasmania” says it all. The state has ceased to be a football entity other than as a financial benefactor to two Victorian clubs, and a provider of players to all. Within this obscenely one-sided arrangement, the state’s football administration – reliant on the AFL for funding – can but smile politely.
One argument often mounted against Tasmania’s case for its own AFL team is that the state is too prone to regional division to make it work. And it’s true the rivalry between north and south is historic, bitter, and often dislocating.
One senses the AFL champing at the bit to exploit this by establishing a regular Hawthorn versus North Melbourne derby. Such an idea was enthusiastically mooted by Hawthorn CEO, Stuart Fox, upon the deal being brokered to have the Kangaroos play in Hobart. Then there was back-pedalling as the crassness of the concept dawned.
Despite this, a home-and-away game between the two clubs was scheduled for Launceston’s Aurora Stadium in June. Even the state’s tendency to self-harm is now being seized upon. Rather than taking on a role as the great unifier it could be in Tasmanian life, football will thus emphasise Tasmania’s traditional division.
It’s my fervent belief that, given their own team in the national competition, Tasmanians would find themselves drawn together as never before in the island’s history: such is the power of popular football codes to unify and galvanise. In an environment as small and insular as Tasmania’s, every last one of the state’s half-million people would feel a sense of ownership of their team. When it won great victories, the island would celebrate from Smithton in the far north-west to Bruny Island in the south-east; from the far eastern outpost of Eddystone Point to Queenstown in the rugged west. They would do it together. The imagination of that – and I write this as one who has been an expatriate for more than thirty years – sends an excited shiver down my spine.
But in the foreseeable future it won’t happen. Tasmania’s best prospect right now appears to be the eventual transplanting of an unloved North Melbourne; indeed it’s easy to believe this is the AFL’s ultimate plan. Yet it would be the most effective way of alienating the maximum number of Tasmanian fans from a team that should be their own.
Tasmania’s AFL loyalties are a complex tapestry. St Kilda established a large groundswell of support when Baldock, Stewart, Howell, and John Bingley helped it to the 1966 flag and these affiliations have been passed on to another generation. Hawthorn now has close to 10,000 Tasmanian members. Traditionally popular clubs like Collingwood, Carlton, and Essendon are supported by their many Tasmanian fans as fiercely as they are in their Victorian constituencies.
While many of these Tasmanian supporters say they would never switch loyalties, even for a genuine Tasmanian team, I believe they would surprise themselves if ever the reality emerged. But I’m not sure they’d switch for a transplanted North Melbourne with its history as a rival.
Yet this appears as Tasmania’s only hope. The AFL already has a full book of 18 teams; to introduce a 19th would be inconvenient. And Tasmania, for all its reasonable right to inclusion, has never been more than a matter of convenience.
Comments
John Carr 9 July 2012
Tim, I completely concur and bemoan the lack of credence given to Tasmanian football. While people say that Tassie footy can't be unified, the Tasmanian VFL team of a few years back appeared to be well received by the whole Tasmanian public, with healthy crowds around the state. Who could forget sellout crowds at Bellerive Oval to see Tassie in the VFL finals? They were the biggest 'VFA' attendances in many a year. It's unfortunate that this team did not continue on and press for acceptance to the league.
I can never understand the argument that Tasmania is not a big enough market either. If Geelong can successfully maintain it's own team, then who's to say that Tasmania could not? Unfortunately, Vlad Demetriou indicated just recently that it won'd happen in his reign. The game to me won't be truly national until Tasmania has a team, and it is a slap in the face that Western Sydney and the soulless Gold Coast have teams representing them and Tassie does not. I'm sure Bellerive or York Park wouldn't boast the amount of empty yet artistically designed plastic seats had they joined in festivities this year.
For the record, my team, Richmond, has been blessed and is continued to be blessed with Tasmanian talent, from Hart, Stewart, Roach, Richo, Riewoldt to name but a few. It would be great to hear these greats along the Tasmanian greats form other clubs make some more noise about this issue.
Barkly St End 10 July 2012
What an amazing list of footballers to have come out of Tassie over the decades. Now that we're at 18 teams, with the newest teams copping frightful hidings, it's impossible to picture the league ever growing beyond that number. This means that the current situation with Tassie, which most footy fans would find unfair and unacceptable, can only be rectified in the future in the partial demise of a traditional club, upsetting to many fans in its own way.
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