When the Pivitonians met the Bloods

The stars in heaven aligned. The stars came out to play. Geelong have carried off their 10th V/AFL Premiership.

For anybody who was on the Moon last weekend and somehow missed that final score, Geelong 20.13 (133) d Sydney 8.4 (52) at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of a crowd of over 100,000.

Before the game I had heard it said that Geelong and Sydney had never met to decide a Premiership, but that isn’t quite the full story is it? Until the 1980s the Sydney Swans were the South Melbourne Football Club, a club which along with Geelong was a foundation member of the Victorian Football League in 1897. If you look back far enough into the stories of these clubs, Geelong and South Melbourne, you will find a tale to be told.

Before the VFL formed, teams played regularly in the Victorian Football Association competition and in the 1880s, the two strongest teams running around in the VFA were Geelong and South Melbourne. Together, these two teams managed to win 12 of the 13 premierships decided between 1878 and 1890.

The Geelong Football Club in 1884. (Source: Wikipedia)

This was a bit before my time you know, but I can tell you it was an era before the round robin style finals series we are all familiar with and which is now used to decide the Premiership. The team that finished on top of the ladder at the end of the home and away season was deemed to be the premier team of that year and in 1886 both South Melbourne and Geelong went into September undefeated. A meeting planned between the two teams that month would decide it. The winner would go to the top of the table and become the Premiership team, the loser would finish as the runner up. It was a match that even to modern eyes had all the trappings of a Grand Final of the modern era.

The South Melbourne Football Club in 1890. In an era before the concept of an “Away” jumper, Geelong played in blue hoops, South red which I guess must have caused a little confusion. (Source: Wikipedia)

This famous game has been called “the sport’s most important match of the 19th century”, and has become known to modern football historians, (yes, there really are such a thing) as the “Match of the Century”.

The “villainous” South Melbourne recruit, William Bushby pictured two years after the Lakeside Oval clash. (Source: Stump & Co photograph, Wikipedia)

The lead up to the game was steeped in controversy. In their last meeting resulting in a draw, South Melbourne had been accused of deliberately turning up late for the game to achieve a shortened match in a tactic to combat Geelong’s perceived greater endurance and athleticism. Professionalism was yet to be openly accepted in sport and tensions were raised further when it was revealed that South had somehow convinced a certain Mr William Bushby, the Captain of the Port Adelaide Football Club and reputedly the best Australian footballer “in the world,” to travel from the Colony of South Australia to Victoria to play in the game. Bushby said he had come to Victoria for a short time for a business opportunity, but nobody was letting on what the opportunity might involve.

The night before the game, these tensions turned to alarm then outrage when it was discovered that the rail line near Newport had been pulled up in an apparent attempt to derail the Geelong service in front of two special trains bringing the team and its supporters, an act of sabotage committed by persons quote, “unknown”.

They took their football seriously in 1886.

As reported by a thrilled writer in the Argus newspaper:

“No football match ever played in the colonies excited the same amount of interest as the premiership decider between Geelong and South Melbourne.” (The Argus, p10, 6 September, 1886)

The game took place on Saturday, 4 September, 1886 at the old South Melbourne, Lakeside Oval where over 34,000 people crammed into an outer designed to hold about a third of that number, while as many again jostled outside the closed gates. This was the largest crowd to see a football game of any type anywhere in the world up to that point and to this day it remains one of the largest to ever witness a VFA game.

News of the score or rumours of the score were breathlessly passed up and down Clarendon Street in South Melbourne by an excited mob gathering outside packed shops. Finally, after the bell sounded at the ground to announce the end of the match there was a cry from the largely parochial South Melbourne crowd inside. Geelong were the victors, 4.19 to 1.5 and, perhaps fittingly that scoundrel Bushby had hardly touched the ball. His direct opponent, the Geelong Captain Dave Hickinbottom, was named by contemporary sports writers as Best On Ground.

136 years later Geelong and the team that in another time was South Melbourne have played the game that has been pencilled in by some as their first ever meeting in a Grand Final. The match was a rout, criticized by many as a debacle not worth watching but I say this again. That’s all a matter of perspective. To say I enjoyed it is an understatement.

When I was old enough to choose a football team to pin my hope and heart upon, it seemed to me that Geelong and South Melbourne were regularly fighting it out on the bottom of the ladder for the right to the wooden spoon. Sort of like the situation between these two clubs in the 1880s, but in reverse. The only way seemed to be up from there.

VFL Cats scarf hanging at the door, Yallambie, September, 2022

Geelong’s record breaking captain, Selwood pictured on the cover of the 2022 GF Footy Record.

So, like millions of other Australians, I watched the game on the telly at home last Saturday, a Geelong scarf from the VFL era draped over the front door here. Our boy was fortunate enough to get himself a ticket and was there to witness history, texting me pictures and providing a commentary like a modern day version of the Clarendon Street summary of 1886. It was clear from the emotion seen when the veteran Geelong Captain Joel Selwood kicked a goal just before the final siren that this would be the Cat Cap’s last game, and what a way to finish.

“Nipper” Trezise (right) chasing the ball in a Geelong v Collingwood game of the 1950s. (Private Collection)

This family has always been Geelong on both sides, the result of an earlier family connection, and it’s moments like these that bring it all home. I messaged a cousin after the game and eventually received a reply. She had fallen asleep before the first bounce and only woke up when it was over.

Life’s like that. Close your eyes, and you will miss it.

Time and place

The Queen is dead.

Long live the King.

Words not heard in British nations since the end of the Victorian era and the death of another long reigned monarch. The death of Queen Elizabeth marks the end of an era and is a sobering reminder if anybody needs one that nothing lasts forever, even an Australian dependence on a political institution that has stood the test of time for generations. In the words of the US President last week, “in a world of constant change, she was a steadying presence.” What this has to do with Yallambie, God, the Footy, freshwater fishing and a humble meat pasty is unclear, but at a time when scientists are floundering to find a unifying Theory Of Everything, I propose that in some ways, everything is connected.

Most people alive today have never known a time when there was a monarch other than QE2, and while I expect the time will come in my life time when Australia votes to become a Republic within the British Commonwealth, that time is not now. Many people my age will remember primary school years when we were required to line up at the obligatory school assembly on a Monday morning to sing the national anthem, “God Save the Queen” before marching around the quadrangle, out of step and out of tune. The lyric, “Long to reign over us,” has proved prescience but when Punk Rock happened, God Save the Queen gave the institution a whole new meaning. In her lifetime, the late Queen oversaw the gradual dismantling of the British Empire as an institution, an institution with a colonial past during which so much of Yallambie’s history was written. Modern sensibilities find much of the history of Empire problematic but the past is past and cannot be unwritten. If we can learn from it, then something is achieved.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart painted by William Mosman around 1750.

The recent renaming of a beer maker, the Colonial Brewing Company of Western Australia is apparently a matter of import to some people, but I’m wondering, are we merely paying lip service to the issue? What’s in a name anyway? With the passing of the Queen, there are some who suggested that the new king might style himself on one of his other given names – George, Arthur or even Philip. After all, there was precedent. His grandfather Bertie named himself George while his mother called herself Elizabeth II, even although there had never been an Elizabeth I of Great Britain. Given the unfortunate history of those earlier kings with a Charlie moniker, it might not have come as a surprise. One Charles spent the first 10 years of his reign in exile, another found himself shorter mid reign by the length of a head and his neck while a third, the Bonnie Prince Pretender of Floraville association himself was never even crowned.

So the present day version went for the obvious and Charles III has been quickly proclaimed as King of Australia while his mother is buried on the other side of the world this evening, (Australian time). Yes, under the current laws of this land there really is a king of Australia but did you know, another less widely appreciated role of the king is as the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England”, something that would have meant something to those earlier Yallambie “Colonials”. For a new King who is a life-long Anglican but who has called for mutual tolerance in religion and has been known to talk to his plants, I find something delightful in this.

So the King’s eldest son William gets to go up a rung on the ladder, by tradition becoming the Prince of Wales in the process although I don’t suppose anybody asked the Welsh their thoughts on this matter. William, Prince of Wales, also gets to be the new Duke of Cornwall, a title which comes with a £1bn estate and a multi-million pound annual income, most of it earned from assets that perhaps surprisingly are not actually located in Cornwall or which will allow him to give up his day job, waving at people and cutting ribbons.

The grave of Thomas Wentworth Wills at Warringal Cemetery, Heidelberg. “The founder of Australian football”

When I think of things that come from Cornwall I think of King Arthur, Tintagel and the Cornish pasty, not particularly in that order. With Geelong set to play in another AFL Grand Final next week, it got me thinking. Has it really been a year since I wrote about Tom Wills lying in the dust at Warringal, footy finals and that great Australian culinary masterpiece, the Aussie meat pie?

This writer’s father (right) fishing for river trout in the 1950s

My mother, dead these long years, came from Surrey but I remember her making a pretty mean old pasty back in the day. She would bake them and put them in a hamper for the footy or for my father to take wrapped in lunch paper on fishing trips to the Mitta Mitta, on which trips if he relied on what ended up on his fishing line, he would possibly have gone hungry.

Mum’s old recipe called for carrot and peas, alongside the more traditional ingredients. I remember her saying the extra ingredients really disqualified them as proper Cornish pasties, but that’s the way my dad liked it and that’s the way she baked them. I made these again last week for the televised finals and it is only by doing so now that I realize just how much work is and always was required.

The match day ball from the 1952 Grand Final. (Source: Victorian Collections, from the Geelong Football Club) https://victoriancollections.net.au/items/5a08191a21ea671aa81c88e9

The boy and I were at the game on Friday night with 77 thousand others to see what turned out to be a very one sided affair. Geelong by a country mile you might say. I heard people, apparently without a vested interest, say as we left the ground that it wasn’t a very good game, but I guess that is all a matter of your perspective. For those who believe in omens, there was a news story the other day that reflected on the fact that the last two grand finals played under a new monarch, in 1937 and 1952, were both won by Geelong. The stars align in their eternal passage across the skies as a new king takes to the throne. Time moves on, the Queen is dead. “Carpe Diem Geelong”.

How to make a Cornish pasty in Australia,
and without reference to Cornwall

Ingredients:
I X quantity of shortcrust pastry
500g of lean mince steak
200g chopped ham or bacon
2 onions
2 X carrot
A couple of potatoes
A cup of freshly shelled peas
½ turnip
2 X teaspoons salt
A dozen shakes of ground pepper
2 X spoons of Worcestershire sauce
1 X teaspoon of crushed garlic
2 X spoons of chopped parsley
Extra parsley sprigs to garnish

Method:
Your true Cornish pasty would never have carrot or peas in the recipe, but really a pasty can have whatever you like to put into it and in whatever quantities you care to name. It’s said the old time Cornish miners would take their pasties into the mines and warm them on a shovel over a candle. In the dark I don’t suppose they could see what they were eating. This is the way I made them at home a week ago during the televised finals, without a shovel and without need of a candle.

Collect the ingredients. Peel and dice the onions, carrots, potatoes and turnip. Place the meat, chopped vegetables, peas, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, crushed garlic and chopped parsley into a large basin and mix well. Roll out the shortcrust pastry into sheets onto a lightly floured surface. I used frozen pastry, which is of course much, much easier. Cut each sheet into a round shape and place a generous quantity of the prepared mixture onto each. Brush half way around the edges with a little water and fold one half of the sheet across onto the other into the shape of a crescent. Use a fork to seal the edges and crimp along the side. Place each pasty onto an oven tray and prick across the top with a fork. Glaze with a little milk and bake in a warm oven at 200°C for 10 minutes, then at 150 °C for 30-35 minutes, or until brown and golden. Garnish with the extra parsley sprigs, and serve. Makes about a dozen pasties, depending on the size.