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Many AFL fans will tell you that their game is the only truly indigenous code of football in Australia, and that the other codes are simply British exports.
In fact, many sports enjoyed in Australia today had their originating laws exported from Britain throughout her Empire. These include Football (Soccer), Tennis, Cricket, Badminton, Rugby Union – and through extension Rugby League – Hockey, and Australian Rules Football.
For Aussie Rules is not a game whose founding laws were created in Australia by Australians. It is a game, like Football and the Rugby codes, whose founding laws are based squarely in Britain.
To quote from the article: National myths, imperial pasts and the origins of Australian Rules football: “The set of rules developed in Melbourne in the 1850s and 1860s was simply one of many dozens of variations in the playing of football throughout the British Empire. The Melbourne rules were no more indicative of an Australian independence of mind than the Sheffield FA’s rules were an expression of Yorkshire nationalism.”
All the laws that may seem to make AFL uniquely Australian such as the Mark, offside interpretation, bouncing the ball, abolition of hacking, and even the playing area and team size, were documented in the various mish mash of British football before the original drafting of Australian Rules football laws in Melbourne in 1859.
If AFL fans do wish to boast of their codes ‘indigenous superiority’ they can at least point to the fact that of the British football laws chosen to create Aussie Rules, they were at least drafted in Melbourne and not Cambridge, Sheffield, or Eton.
Notably, while the founding laws of the NFL are as dependent on the various nineteenth century British football rules as the AFL, NRL, and ARU, NFL fans do not declare American Football as ‘America’s indigenous game’, presumably as the NFL has no real football rival in the USA.
The codes have all been steadily evolving for more than a century and if any of the law makers of the original versions of British football were to see a game of NRL, AFL, NFL, Football or Rugby today, they would be amazed, perhaps even appalled, by the speed, size and strength (and pay cheque) of the modern footballer.
Ironically, Rugby, a game that beat both the AFL and NRL to documenting its preferred version of the various football rules of Britain, has the least say in it’s law variations in Australia today.
The NRL, due to Australia’s domination of international rugby league, and the AFL, due a lack of an international game, can both crop and change rules as they please. Due to the size of Rugby internationally, the ARU has never had, and never will have, this luxury.
While the originating laws of Australia’s two leading codes, the NRL and AFL, are both British, it is the long standing rivalries in the domestic competitions that make both games the dominate codes in this country today.
And you could suggest that most fans of the NRL, ARU, and A-League could care less about exactly which of the melting pot of British rules were used to found their games, and by whom and where. They support one or more of the codes because they enjoy watching them, which is surely the whole point?
To again quote the above mentioned article: “In short, Aussie Rules is merely one of those variations of British football that managed to survive and ultimately thrive.”
Is the AFL Australia’s indigenous Game?
No. But as its current laws are controlled in this country and the game is not yet played away from our shores, the game in certainly Australian.
And the fact it is one of five football codes to have survived from all the variations of ‘football’ in nineteenth century Britain, is a sure indication of its strength and resilience.
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