Football’s First Free Kick: Demography and the Media – How and Why Australia Got a Game of Its Own

Abstract

There have been numerous attempts to explain why the precocious code of football that started as a game played under Melbourne Club rules devised in 1859 became the dominant form in Victoria and the most influential in Australia, while Association football (soccer) had little impact until the second half of the twentieth century. In this article, attention is directed at some demographic features that have not been addressed in the literature and on the journalists who helped shape public perceptions of this form of the game. For the first 20 years after the codification of this unique football there was virtually no inward migration into Victoria, so the domestic game had its first free kick with few foreigners with different ideas of how the game should be played to disturb its establishment. Furthermore, the journalists who shaped the ideas of the readership of the Victorian newspapers had little or no knowledge of the forms of football played in Victoria prior to 1855, and their unconscious or conscious imperialism helped secure the pre-eminence of the new code.