Whence
Australian rules football
Game

Where does Australian rules football come from?

Australian rules football comes from Melbourne. It grew out of the football that cricketers and schoolboys began playing in the city's parklands in 1858, and in May 1859 members of the Melbourne Football Club wrote down the game's first rules.

A cricketer's letter

Tom Wills, credited as Australia's first cricketer of significance, had played an early form of rugby football as a teenager at Rugby School in England. On 10 July 1858 the newspaper Bell's Life published his letter: now that cricket was over for the winter, why could cricketers not 'form a foot-ball club, and form a committee of three or more to draw up a code of laws?' Two weeks later he was organising matches in Richmond Paddock, beside the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Ten rules in a hotel

In August 1858 Melbourne Grammar School and Scotch College played a famous match there, 40 players a side, with a round ball and goals about half a mile apart; Wills was one of the umpires. On 17 May 1859 Wills and the journalists William Hammersley and James Thompson met at the Parade Hotel near the cricket ground; most accounts add the schoolteacher Thomas Smith. Wills suggested rugby's rules, but, Hammersley recalled, nobody understood them except himself. They wrote ten simple rules instead, and a handwritten copy survives.

A game of its own

The founders looked at the rules of several English schools and kept them simple, partly to limit rough play on Melbourne's hard grounds. Tripping and pushing were allowed, but hacking, kicking an opponent's shins, was banned. There was no offside rule, and a player who caught the ball straight from a kick could call 'mark' and take a free kick. In 1877 fourteen clubs from the city and the country formed an association, and the game became a code of its own.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Origins of Australian rules football ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Tom Wills ↗ · afl.com.au ↗

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