While the game had its genesis in Victoria, it did not take long before it spread Australia-wide, albeit not without its difficulties in a nation struggling to establish itself. By Bernard Whimpress

There are a number of common elements and some differences in the growth of football beyond the boundaries of the colony of its origin. In South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and Queensland in the 1860s and 1870s, there were several sets of rules vying for ascendancy. In South Australia, the first games, played even earlier in the 1850s, were under Harrow Rules (from the English Public School), and by 1870 there were divisions between what were known as Old Adelaide, Kensington and Melbourne Rules.

In Perth, the first games were an amalgam of rugby union rules – as they were in Hobart. In Brisbane and Sydney (but not elsewhere), there was an early rivalry with rugby. Two main questions demand to be answered. How did the game diffuse to become the dominant football code in South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and initially in the Australian Capital Territory? And why did it lose primacy to rugby in New South Wales and Queensland?

The diffusion of a sport can take various forms. Often the form is seen as top-down where an agent takes the sport to a new group rather like a missionary converting new followers to a religion. But it can also work in reverse – bottom-up – where a group wants to embrace, or is receptive to, what is new. Football does not appear to have been spread from Victoria by a missionary spirit but rather seeped into the sporting fabric of the other colonies and territories as a result of geographical, political and existing sporting linkages, the impact of the gold rushes and the zeitgeist.

Australian Football started in the same decade as the Victorian gold rushes. Immigrants came from all over the world to try their luck prospecting and were no doubt imbued with the optimistic spirit of the age, a spirit which might also favour a nationalist, republican identity and a willingness to adopt anything Australian-made. The concept of a “code of our own” had arrived at just the right time. South Australia and Tasmania, as Victoria’s geographical neighbours, were more likely to adopt the Victorian game than its northern neighbour New South Wales, jealous of its position as the premier colony, and threatened by Victoria’s rapid expansion. While football made a promising start in Queensland, the tyranny of distance in its isolation from Victoria told against its expansion when rugby links started to be forged with New South Wales. Early football in Perth benefitted from the in?uence of a substantial number of Victorian and South Australian immigrants who had already been playing the Australian game. Twenty years later, the establishment of football in the territories perhaps relies on political history. What became the Northern Territory had previously been administered by South Australian governments and many of its public servants were drawn from Adelaide and played Australian Football. Although Canberra was much closer to Sydney than Melbourne, the southern city had been the headquarters of the national government so that, in its formative years, the bulk of public servants transferring to the new capital would have come from Melbourne and brought its football code with them.

In Adelaide, the South Australian Football Association (SAFA) competition reigned supreme unlike Western Australia where a Goldfields competition was strong before World War I as well as the Perth-based Western Australian Football Association (WAFA). Tasmanian football quickly took on a north-south rivalry with major associations based in Hobart and Launceston and this eventually extended a third arm to the north-west around the developing towns of Devonport and Burnie. Issues of professionalism, brutality and crowd violence (often described as larrikinism) in the 1890s were argued out in the Adelaide and Perth press, as they had been in Melbourne. In Sydney and Brisbane, rugby gained the upper hand, and the associations which had formed in each city collapsed in the late 19th century before reforming early in the 20th. In the territories (Northern and Australian Capital), leagues formed quickly after the introduction of the game, although in Darwin, the chequered history of the first 20 years was caused by racial tensions rather than threats from other football codes. Three states (South Australia, Western Australia and New South Wales) added the clumsy word ‘National’ to the title of their major leagues in the 1920s and Queensland did so from the 1940s to the 1960s. However, the territories (like Victoria) refrained from doing so.