The ‘Chimera’ of Origins: Association Football in Australia before 1880

Abstract

It is generally accepted that organised Association football (soccer) commenced in Australia in Sydney in 1880. This article challenges that starting point by revealing earlier games of codified soccer – not in order to establish an earlier point of origin but to challenge the very idea of origins. Recent work on football in Australia in the 1850s has begun to gather the unearthed traces of rule-bounded small-sided games brought to Australia from Britain and Ireland. Some of these were games with a strong developmental link to present day soccer in Australia. Yet the nearly disabling problem for this kind of research is that as researchers venture archivally backward in time the images become more blurred and the distinctions between codes become harder to make. Even as potential origin points become temporally closer they recede into the shadows of archival absence. The dilemma for football historians lies in the necessity of engagement with the established origins that lie at the heart of the historiography of all major sports, origins that both orient and limit debate. Present-day administrators use anniversaries of origin to generate publicity. They help to get stories rolling: ‘Once upon a time Wills or Webb Ellis or Doubleday did something so special that they got a great game started.’ Aside from often being simply incorrect, origin theses tend to nurture hegemonic narratives that by their very nature rule counter-narratives out of bounds.