In 1802, the navigator Matthew Flinders—sailing on the aptly named sloop, HMS Investigator—mapped the Victorian coastline with meticulous precision, leaving behind a clear and undeniable picture.
Conversely, more than 150 years of local attempts to map Victoria’s early football landscape have ended mired and scuttled in wishful thinking.
Story written & researched by Sean Fagan for SaintsAndHeathens
The origins of Australian Rules football—a story that began with the 17 May 1859 rules of the Melbourne FC—are frequently enveloped in a narrative that views its unique physical traits as a radical break from British traditions.
Modern commentary often relies on imaginative speculation to attribute the game’s most iconic features—namely, no off-side laws, the tactical punt kick out of hands and the high-leaping catch—as being present at foundation and caused by localised inspirations.
However, a rigorous chronological analysis of the contemporary print archives, early sports journalism, and the original 1859 rule book reveals a clear, linear descent from English public school football, specifically the code developed at Rugby School.
Every core mechanism of the early Australian game was imported directly by colonial sportsmen who were reproducing an athletic framework they had already perfected in the United Kingdom. When the contemporary sources used to claim a unique local origin are examined objectively, they reveal their pure English public school lineage.
THE COPY-PASTED “MARK”
To understand how the early Australian game was constructed, one must look directly at the primary text of the first rules. A foundational piece of evidence often cited to argue for a unique local kicking and catching culture is Rule 6 of the Melbourne FC’s rules, published in May 1859:
“Any player catching the ball directly from the foot may call ‘mark’. He then has a free kick, no player from the opposite side being allowed to come inside the spot marked.”
Some analyses of this rule argue that the italicised emphasis on the word “directly” is a covert, descriptive nod to a specific type of localised kick, such as a punt (more specifically, a drop punt). Statistically and logically, however, this interpretation completely flips cause and effect.
Rule 6 is not a rule governing how to kick; it is a rule strictly defining the parameters of a legal catch. The word “directly” serves a simple, defensive legal purpose: it mandates that the ball must after it is kicked travel cleanly from a player’s boot, into an opponent’s or teammate’s hands, without in between hitting the ground, deflecting off a tree, the goal post, or skimming off a bystander first.
There is nothing in Rule 6 that specifies or limits the form of the kick. Nor does “directly” infer the punt kick alone. The term “directly” can also be met by a ball kicked via a place kick, drop kick or, what we today would call, a soccer-style kick. You cannot infer from Rule 6 what in those first years was the most common method of kicking of the ball.
This phrasing of Rule 6 was not a novel invention drafted in Melbourne in 1859. It is the same fair catch process from the established football rules of Rugby School (per both 1851 and 1859, the two most recent printed versions):
“iii. Fair Catch is a catch direct from the foot”
“iv. Charging is fair … in case of a kick from a catch, as soon as the player offers to kick, but he may always draw back, unless he has actually touched the ball with his foot.”
Tom Wills and his fellow committee members did not invent the concept of an unhindered free kick resulting from an airborne catch, nor did they invent the terminology, other than putting into writing the spoken safety cry of ‘mark!’ to claim it (whereas in rugby the catcher had to very quickly make the mark in the ground with their foot or suffer being bowled over).
As per Tom Brown’s Schooldays, where after a fair catch the player Crab is going to attempt a place-kick at goal:
“Fond hope! it is kicked out and caught beautifully. Crab strikes his heel into the ground, to mark the spot where the ball was caught, beyond which the school line may not advance; but there they stand, five deep, ready to rush the moment the ball touches the ground.”
Thus in Melbourne they took the existing, standard English definition of a “fair catch” and pasted it directly into their rulebook. The only difference, by the omission of rugby’s accompanying offside rules, was that a player could take a “mark” (fair catch) by catching a ball direct from a teammate located behind them.
Both of these football games allowed from a “fair catch” the taking of a punt kick, but as discussed further below, the punt kick (and later the drop punt) would not for decades become the preferred form of kicking in Australian rules.
THE AIRBORNE GAME WAS NOT AIR BORN
Evidence of early signs of an aerial game? A fortnight after the Melbourne FC’s new football rules were drawn up at the Parade Hotel, a scratch match was played among the club’s members. This was match was in part reported in verse by Bell’s Life in Victoria on 4 June 1859. The poem describes a player named William Hammersley on the field:
“Swift as an eagle on the wing
Holds fast the ball, then with a sudden spring
He leaps high in the air and kicks the volume round.
The ball emits a hollow moaning sound”
Modern interpretations have pointed to this verse, or more specifically the words “then with a sudden spring / He leaps high in the air”, as definitive proof that high-leaping catches of the ball were a distinguishing feature of the game from day one.
But even the most rudimentary reading of this text, in the context of its surrounding lines, destroys this claim. The poem explicitly notes that Hammersley is holding in the ball, jumps to kick the ball, and the kicked ball can be heard.
Leaving the ground with both feet to execute a drop-kick or the less common punt was standard then, and even now, to maximise forward momentum. Nineteenth-century sports illustrations and woodcuts consistently depict this.
MORE “SPECCY” SPECULATING
As the game progressed into the 1860s, eyewitness accounts confirm players were jumping to catch the ball. In 1862, a sports journalist writing under the pseudonym “Mr. Pip” for Bell’s Life in Victoria reported on a match, noting that:
“…one Melbourne youth jumped wonderfully high in the air and caught the ball ere it came near the others and called ‘Mark’.”
Are we really at the point of human mechanics where young men jumping for possession of a ball was unknown until football was played in Melbourne?
While this quote does explicitly describe a high catch, “wonderfully high” must be read relative to the times—treating it as evidence of a unique local innovation and an early form of a 20th century shoulder-lifted ‘speccy’ ignores the basic mechanics of boys at play in many games and pastimes, whether English or not.
As shown above, footballers were jumping when kicking the football. There is of course from Rugby School the jumping involved in the boundary line-outs in football, and mere boyish horseplay and fooling, as mentioned in Tom Brown’s Schooldays:
“There is young Brooke and the bulldogs. Mark them well. They are the ‘fighting brigade,’ the ‘diehards,’ larking about at leapfrog to keep themselves warm, and playing tricks on one another.”
Crucially, Mr. Pip’s account reflects the protocol of rugby football: the player caught the ball and immediately shouted “Mark!”. Now, perhaps at Rugby School the boys weren’t as in Melbourne shouting out “Mark!” when “making a mark” to claim a “fair catch” for a “free kick”, but the word “mark” and process is lifted straight from the laws of rugby.
For a player’s jump to be described as “wonderfully high”, it cannot be a commonplace occurrence, nor yet a distinguishing feature of the game. The aptly named “Free Kick” writing in Bell’s Life in Victoria in 1864 plainly states:
“…we often find a game lasting a whole afternoon with only one goal being kicked, and notwithstanding our allowing a “free kick” for a catch, we have plenty of scrummaging, and at times rather severe.”
Writing in 1874 about a meeting of the Albert Park FC (via a 1880 merger the Sydney Swans), a correspondent under the Napoleonic pseudonym of “Ajaccio” deplored those members who “jump to catch the ball when one of their own side is marking it”.
This indicates it was still at this time proper to remain with both feet planted. Indeed, per The Footballer (1876) chapter ‘The Victorian Game of Football With Hints to Players’, all were cautioned “Jumping for marks is dangerous, ‘I pray you avoid it’.”
Con Hickey, secretary of the Australian Football Council, writing in The Sporting Globe in 1935:
“Those flying leaps above the pack to pull down the ball cleanly… they were not always a feature. There was a time when the high mark was unknown. Back in the early eighties, long before the League [VFL] emerged, players marked the ball on their chests. They seldom leapt for it more than a few inches from the ground. Solid safety was the policy…”
TRYING TOO HARD
Perhaps the most glaring misstep by those trying to detach early Victorian rules football from its British roots involves an early match in 1858 between South Yarra and Melbourne that drew significant newspaper attention. The match was reported on not only by The Argus (briefly) but also by Punch magazine, which published a long, multi-stanza descriptive poem detailing the action on the paddock.
Modern commentary rightly notes that it was a highly significant game—but regretably, much like the 1858 schoolboy rugby match commemorated by the statue-builders outside the MCG, it is absurdly elevated to a nascent form of Victorian rules football, despite taking place the year before Melbourne FC even came into existence and its committee first sat down to haggle out a set of rules.
Putting aside the immovable conundrum of the timeline, the evidence within the Punch poem itself completely refutes the idea of the match being under embryonic Australian rules. The poem describes a 27 men-a-side rugby game, culminating at the end with the convoluted Rugby School “punt-out” and “try at goal.”
“However, as the story ends,
The Melbourne mob out-kicked their friends,
And fair within the fatal stick,
With one triumphant joyous kick
And mad delight, still waxing madder,
They sent the India-rubber bladder.
The goal was passed, the day was won”
It is a set of mechanics that could only originate from the specialised, legalistic traditions of the English public school system. Early football matches in Victoria were so heavily bound to this British import that they faithfully recreated these exact, complicated routines on the grass of Melbourne.
OFFSIDE WITH HISTORY
The modern inference held today, from the absence of any on-side or off-side rules in the first Melbourne rules, is that rugby football was akin to a linear Napoleonic battlefield—a dense, grinding clash of two opposing armies facing-off at Waterloo.
Yet the rules at Rugby School were not as rigid as this. An off-side player was not out of the game. In large parts the rules governed what an off-side player may do, and they were a prominent part of a team’s armoury.
As illustrated in Tom Brown’s Schooldays after the School House has scored a goal, play restarts with a kick-off from the half-way line by the Rest of the School (the School team), but many of that team are upfield (offside) waiting for the ball to arrive:
“… the ball is placed again midway, and the School are going to kick off. Their leaders have sent their lumber into [School House] goal, and rated the rest soundly, and one hundred and twenty picked [School] players-up are there, bent on retrieving the game. They are to keep the ball in front of the School-house goal, and then to drive it in by sheer strength and weight. They mean heavy play and no mistake, and so old Brooke [School House captain] sees, and places Crab Jones in quarters just before the goal, with four or five picked players who are to keep the ball away to the sides, where a try at goal [by the School], if obtained, will be less dangerous than in front.”
Indeed, we find a further example of this era at Law XII and Definition iv of the first written rules of 1845. In what may well be the direct ancestor to the Melbourne footballers’ rule-obviating hand-pass (and the rugby codes’ diabolical punishment of every accidentally dropped ball), an offside player (described as a player ‘off his side’) who managed to take a ‘fair catch’ (whether from the boot of a friend or foe) was ‘entitled to a fair knock on’ i.e. to strike or punch (but not throw) the ball forward with the arm or hand, even to an offside teammate. [Note: The reference to ‘touching’ in Rule XIX relates to play outside of the touchlines.]
How far back in time offside players ‘knocking on’ had been allowed is not known. It was removed in 1846, along with stricter offside rules, perhaps because it was finally realised that a team could, via offside players, hand-pass (punch) the ball all the way from one goal to the other.
The very existence of these offside instances shown here prove that early offside rules were dynamic boundaries meant to manage tactical positioning and involvement, rather than rigid walls that stopped play entirely.
And even today, offside players in both rugby codes are still not outlaws—they are entitled to and retain in the rules specific structural roles that are the last remnants of rugby football from the time before Victoria was even yet its own separate colony.
FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN
Some scholars prefer the maths. There are seven signatories who officially signed the original 1859 Melbourne FC rules document. Whereas the newspaper accounts confirm just four of these seven men attended the meeting where the rules were devised. Thus, quod erat demonstrandum, there must have been earlier meetings, as why would three of these men sign a document they had no involvement in?
This logic is hard to keep pace with, as clearly the three men not present could and presumably did read the rules before signing. Indeed, the great success and appeal of the Melbourne FC rules was said to be their brevity, clarity and ease to quickly understand.
That a club would assign a rules committee to undertake this task should not surprise anyone aware of procedural norms. But a student of history even remotely aware of the contents of Tom Wills’ famous 1858 letter would already have their answer:
“… why can they not, I say, form a foot-ball club, and form a committee of three or more to draw up a code of laws?”
Had there been earlier meetings, so what of it? It is clear from the contemporaneous accounts that Tom Wills at first suggested the adoption of rugby laws in toto. He did not arrive at the rules meeting and hand out a document with the ten sacred rules all laid out and force their signatures.
In any case, the first rules were amended very soon after—at a meeting Wills did not even attend—proving the on-field game was never purely a Wills-devised creation. Other clubs like Geelong FC also had a say, although the so-called ‘Geelong rules of 1859’ that emerged in 1923 are self-evidently a fictional concoction.
By any consistent global standard, a single club’s 1859 rulebook does not constitute the birth of a code any more than Sheffield FC did for soccer in 1857 or Rugby School in 1845. Collective clubs met and codified their rules by founding the Football Association (soccer) in 1863, the Rugby Football Union in 1871, the Intercollegiate Football Association (gridiron) in 1876, and the Victorian Football Association in 1877.
THE TREACHEROUS PUNT & OTHER CONCEITS
To complete the historical picture chronologically, it must be acknowledged that the sport eventually underwent a distinct tactical mutation that separated it from its British pedigree. While the early foundation was entirely British, the modern, highly recognisable hallmarks of today’s AFL game—specifically the universal reliance on the punt kick and the development of the spectacular high mark—were not present at the sport’s inception in 1859.
Instead, they entered the game as dramatic innovations in the late 19th century. The drop punt is a well documented change in method that arrived in the 1930s.
During the code’s formative era, the place kick and the drop kick were the absolute dominant kicking techniques, used universally by all to transfer the ball and to land goals. Conversely, the punt kick was dismissed by contemporary media and coaches as “the treacherous punt”—a low-return option left primarily to novice rookie players. It was not until the 1880s and subsequent decades that this dynamic flipped. [Link]
As teams gradually mastered the innovation of forwards leaping high into the air to secure a “mark,” the punt kick’s ability to deliver the ball rapidly and directly into the sky began to heavily outweigh the drop kick’s reliance on a lower, chest-height trajectory.
Meanwhile, in 1866 the rules were amended to require the ball to be bounced every five yards when run with—to prevent or discourage running with the ball. The hand (fist) pass grew in the 1890s as a means to circumvent laws to stop absurdly short kicks (to claim a mark) or throwing the ball.
Yet today, paradoxically, both the bounce and the hand-pass are so well-mastered circus tricks that they obviate the very reason they exist in the game at all. Players run with the ball just as far and as quick as any rugby three-quarter back. Players might just as well rugby pass the ball to a team mate.
Considering today’s hand-pass is tantamount to a throw, just three of those apparently deity-ordained ten laws of 17 May 1859 now still exist in an AFL game at all.
ORNITHORHYNCHUS CHAOTICUS
Had an English football club or school adopted the Melbourne FC rules in 1859, nobody watching the game would have found anything unusual about it.
Certainly, this was not yet a colonial duck beak grafted on the head of a beaver.
© Sean Fagan
When is a football code established?
Criteria A (The Text-First Standard): If a code is defined by the earliest written club rules that evolved into a modern game, Association Football (Sheffield, 1858) is the oldest, followed by Australian Rules (Melbourne, 1859).
Criteria B (The Association Standard): If a code is defined by the first unified meeting of a multi-club association, soccer Association Football (1863) is the oldest, followed by Rugby Union (1871) and Australian Rules (1877).
