To the devil with it!

The AFL proudly boasts they created “A Game of Our Own,” and maybe they did. But so too had Tasmania—a tough, hybrid Van Diemen’s Land-brewed code that blended rugby, soccer, and local rules. It was doing just fine until 1879, when Melbourne’s long-armed influence got its way by a single vote and, with no sentiment at all, quietly killed off Tassie’s own.

Story written & researched by Sean Fagan ©

Listen up, and I’ll tell you the whole story, the true story—not the one they still preach from the rooftops in Melbourne, that stirring AFL creed of “A Game of Our Own,” as though a handful of fellows in the late 1850s had performed some unique act of colonial Victorian genius and handed down a set of rules touched by perfection.

Truth be told, all around the Empire, clubs and schools were devising local rules to play football. The 1859 Melbourne FC rules were simply one of many dozens of variations. Maybe they were the dandiest set of rules, but given they were soon amended often enough, probably not.

Anyway, as some know, Melbourne was born out of pioneers from Van Diemen’s Land. Hobart (1804) and Launceston (1806) were cities a good thirty years before Melbourne (1835). Heck, the pup of a city was still part of New South Wales and answerable to Sydney until 1851. The southern island gave up its convict prison-island name, Van Diemen’s Land, to the more polite “Tasmania” in 1856.

Yet, the island had forged a football game of its own—rough-hewn, practical, and born of the island’s independent streak—only to see it extinguished not by superior play on the field, but by the economic gravity of a booming mainland neighbour and a single deciding vote.

The 1860s and 1870s were a time when every decent-sized town across the British Empire was having its own crack at football. Tom Brown’s Schooldays had made Rugby School football wildly fashionable, but the actual rules on the ground varied markedly from paddock to paddock.

Sydney leaned heavily into the rugby game. No surprise given it was the first colony, built on the fiery spectator sport of the red-coated NSW Rum Corps against the iron-willed Governor Bligh. The Van Diemen’s Land colony, too, was more British bulldog mixed with American sealers in dockside hotels than a sunny pink rose tea garden.

Major W.T. Conder, later President of the Australian Amateur Football Council, was blunt when he looked back in The Mercury on 15 September 1936: “In the ’70s, the Australian game was not played in Tasmania. The football played consisted of soccer, rugby and a cross between the two games known as the Tasmanian game.”

W.H. Cundy, the Victorian missionary who claimed credit for carrying the Melbourne gospel south, arrived in Hobart in early 1878 and discovered what he thought of as “a mongrel sort of game, composed chiefly of soccer and rugby, with some local additions.”

Maybe it says something that the Victorians did not think so much of football and Tasmanians as to come knocking for the twenty years before Mr Cundy. A bit like they had no care for Tasmanian horse breeding until 1870, when at odds of 100-8, the Tasmanian-bred horse Nimblefoot won their precious Melbourne Cup.

Charles Darwin visited Hobart well before these football codes arrived, but his survival of the fittest theory applies well. Pity he didn’t visit a little later! He would have seen his laws of evolutionary pressure playing out on the rutted paddocks of Hobart, where a localised, isolated species of football was ultimately driven to extinction by the overwhelming size, cash, and aggressive adaptation of the booming mainland variety.

The newspapers of the period bear Cundy out as to the features, though not that the game was a mongrel. Advertisements from 1865 offered the “new Rugby shape” ball. By 1874, full-sized Rugby match balls and real Rugby jerseys were for sale in both Hobart and Launceston. The Launceston Football Club, formed in 1875, set about making “all their rules perfect”—scarcely the language of men meekly copying Victorian rules from across the strait.

Hobart in 1879 was a football Babel as clubs each played under wildly different laws. A match between New Town and the Cricket Club that May highlighted the gulf: New Town’s rules were close to Victorian, while the Cricket Club played under English Association (soccer). The reporter noted dryly that each side would be “victorious when playing under its own rules.”

Under New Town’s near-Victorian rules, the Tasmanian game’s most telling feature—dribbling of the football by forwards—became almost impossible, especially given the Tasmanian code’s off-side rules. Matches featured cross-bars, goals only counting if they cleared the bar, unrestricted running with the ball, scrimmages that could last an age, place-kick tries, marks from teammates’ kicks, bouncing while running, and constant disputes caused by the variety of rules between clubs.

Meanwhile, the Cricketers’ Club debated at length. Their chairman favoured the full rugby code he had known in England but admitted its sixty rules were “too elaborate to introduce here.” Some pushed for the simpler English Association (soccer) game. Others had tried Victorian rules and dismissed them as little more than “a succession of long drop kicks and runs with the ball” and “more the handball played by girls at school.”

Cundy later described how the TFA, at the end of the 1878 season, resolved to trial every code in 1879: rugby, soccer, Victorian, the local rules, and even a new experimental mixture of all of them. English and Anglo-Indian residents fought hard for the old-country games. Hopes rose for an English Rugby team coming to the colonies and Tasmania, a tour that might have swung the balance towards rugby. But the New South Wales Rugby Union could not raise the necessary financial guarantees, and the venture collapsed.

Midway through that experimental season, the Hobart clubs held their ballot as to what rules to play football under. Victorian rules won—by exactly one vote.

Even then, the locals could not resist tinkering; they retained the rugby cross-bar and insisted goals must clear it. The Mercury was scathing on 16 and 17 June 1879, declaring the compromise “a mockery and a delusion” that changed the entire character of the play, and the adopted rules “effect will be to originate a Tasmanian code of rules, which the colony will enjoy by herself so long as her isolated position is kept up.”

Well, this new Tasmanian football code was kept up until 1883, when the TFA finally and fully assimilated its laws to those of Victoria (VFA).

This was no glorious, inevitable triumph of a superior code. It was the familiar colonial story of economic and cultural pull. As Melbourne surged into a major city, Tasmania’s trade, people, and social connections swung northward, away from Sydney and New South Wales.

Clubs wanted regular fixtures, bigger crowds, and relevance. Yielding to the stronger, better-organised Victorian game offered survival; clinging to the local hybrid risked isolation and slow decline. As the Victorian code spread, Tasmania’s unique football—with its elements of rugby, soccer and local invention—was made extinct.

We cannot say if the Tasmanian game was better or worse than Victorian rules; no written regulations survive, and old newspapers have only captured so much information. The Tasmanian hybrid—part soccer, part rugby, part island improvisation—would have preserved features and rules favoured by the local people, enjoying football on its grounds played by its players.

What is clear is that the game did not die because it was inferior. It died because it lacked the weight of a booming metropolis and the chance for inter-colonial matches and visits. Ultimately, power, influence, and the practical need to stay connected to the mainland mattered more than abstract sporting merit. In place of character, the island received standardisation.

The Northern Tasmanian Football Association followed suit soon after. Tasmania kept producing tough, skilful footballers, but under rules made on the northern shores of Bass Strait. Its own game became just another forgotten footnote in the march toward a so-called national code. The old hybrid slipped away, but unlike the thylacine, it was not revered in its afterlife—remembered only by old men like Conder in 1930s newspaper columns.

That, sadly, is how football history is often written—by the victors. Tasmania learned that lesson the hard way in 1879. Its unique football code, full of local flavour and hard-fought compromise, was quietly sacrificed so that the Victorian version could claim the field.

So when the modern AFL narrative presents Melbourne’s invention as a singular act of Victorian or Australian originality, one cannot help but mutter the old phrase: To the devil with it!

© Sean Fagan.