Australian Football

During his lifetime, Henry Colden Antill Harrison attracted the honorific title 'father of the game' because of his all round contribution to it over many years as both player and administrator. He began as a player at a club bearing the name Richmond (not the same club as today's Tigers) before replacing his cousin Tom Wills at Melbourne when Wills left for Geelong. Harrison later spent a year himself at the 'Pivot', but it was primarily for his prolonged association with Melbourne that he is remembered.

Off the field, Harrison played leading roles in the VFA, the VFL (which named its headquarters, Harrison House, after him) and the Australasian Football Council, and so if he can not truly be said to have 'fathered' the game in the sense of actually inventing it, he was nevertheless an adoptive father of the highest quality. The fact that, like Wills, he was born in New South Wales is an intriguing anomaly perhaps best not focused on, at any rate not in Victoria.

Author - John Devaney