Aboriginal footy show kicked out of bounds

By ALEC SMART

Viewers of the Marngrook Footy Show are incensed that NITV and SBS have axed the popular program and it won’t be broadcast to coincide with the 2020 Australian Rules’ Football season. National Indigenous Television (NITV), a free television channel that broadcasts programs produced largely by Aboriginal Australians, and its managers Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), reportedly arrived at the decision due to budgetary constraints.

NITV’s channel manager, Tanya Orman, said: “The Marngrook Footy Show has been an important part of NITV’s schedule for 12 years. [However] the media landscape has changed significantly over that time and we have to make tough choices about how we spend our limited budgets across our programming.
“While it was a difficult decision to make after such a long run, NITV remains committed to delivering quality AFL coverage from a uniquely Indigenous perspective.”

However, host Grant Hansen, who launched the original radio program in 1997 to combat the lack of Indigenous football commentators and hosts in broadcast media, insists its popularity rating is high.
The weekly program, broadcast nationally on TV since 2007, also features female reporters Leila Gurruwiwi and Shelley Ware, and earned Logie Award nominations for best sports program in 2015 and 2016.

Marngrook influenced Aussie Rules
The name ‘Marngrook’ derives from an Aboriginal word – either the Woiwurrung or Gunditjmara tribes – meaning ‘ball game’. Prior to the foundation of Australian Rules by Tom Wills in Victoria in 1858, Aborigines across Australia’s south-eastern corner played a competitive game with a stuffed round animal skin ball (sometimes made of kangaroo scrotum!).
The teams were strictly managed to account for players’ size, weight and totemic relationships. However, although the ball was kicked back and forth between team members and ‘marked’ – coincidentally called a mumarki – for a free kick by whomever caught it in the air, like Australian Rules, there were no goals to score and a winning side could only be agreed upon if one team was deemed to have played better.
Written reviews from the 1850s by European settlers reported that the Aborigines played enthusiastically for hours.

Detractors of Australian Rules football, some of whom think it is copied from the similar Gaelic football or at best a latecomer to the plethora of competitive team ball games, are probably unaware that it is the first version of the game known internationally as ‘football’ to be formally codified.
It leads the world with specific rules determining offside players, the shape of the ball, point-scoring tallies and the size of fields and goals.

Although a multitude of different games involving round or oval balls have been played for centuries, including matches in Sydney from the early 1800s, in July 1858, only 34 years after the British Colonial Office agreed with Governor Macquarie’s suggestion that ‘Australia’ was a suitable name for the continent, the first games of Australian Rules Football were played between clubs in Victoria with agreed-upon rules of play.
On 10 July 1858, Tom Wills, a distinguished cricketer and all-round athlete, who grew up in the bush in what became the colony of Victoria, published a letter in Bells Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle calling for the foundation of a ‘foot-ball club’ with a recognised ‘code of laws’. His motivation was a game to keep cricketers busy during the off-season.

Wills, although born and raised in Australia, was educated from the age of 14 at Rugby College in England during the 1850s. There he played an early version of the game we now know as rugby, which differs significantly from soccer football because, unlike the latter, which is hands-free, players may carry the ball. A fortnight after his letter was published Wills joined hotel proprietor Jerry Bryant in organising football matches in Richmond Paddock outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
The following year, on 17 May 1859, he chaired a meeting where ‘Ten Simple Rules’ were drawn up and formalised for the game of Australian football, which were then printed, publicised, and widely distributed. A hand-written copy of these first rules still exists.

Other football games are latecomers
The reason the other international versions of football were codified after Aussie Rules is because they were usually played in elite private schools by the children of wealthy families, which prevented the urban poor from participating. The Factory Act of 1850 significantly increased the recreation time available to lower class children by regulating a reduction in their hours of employment. Until then the majority had to work six days a week, for over twelve hours a day, which stifled participation in leisure activities like team sports.

Between 1856-1863 Cambridge Rules were developed for an early version of soccer football, and between 1858-1877 the Sheffield Rules evolved in unison, and eventually these two were combined in 1877 to form what we now know as soccer. Rugby, founded in Rugby School around 1845, developed along similar lines, separating into two definitive versions in 1895: rugby league and rugby union. Gaelic football (codified 1887) and American and Canadian gridiron football (1874-1880) followed later.

Many historians now believe it highly likely that the young Tom Wills witnessed Marngrook games being played and it influenced his invention of Australian Rules football some years later. As a boy, Wills socialised with the Djab Wurrung and spoke their language.
The AFL issued a statement in June 2019, saying: “Aboriginal history tells us that traditional forms of football were played by Australia’s first peoples all over Australia, most notably in the form of Marngrook. It is Australia’s only Indigenous football game – a game born from the ancient traditions of our country.”

On October 30 Marngrook Footy Show host Grant Hanson posted on Facebook: “We are hopeful of continuing on another network”, however, ABC TV, its logical rescuers, have not yet offered a lifeline and a spokesperson told City Hub: “We have no comment on this.”
There is an online petition at Change.org campaigning to bring the program back, which, as of now, is very busy approaching 10,000 signatures.