Page 6 - History of Parkside Football Club (1897-2017) Editied Version Completed_optimized

Parkside Football Club 1897/2017

It is not hard to draw conclusions on how Australian Football Rules is similar to the indigenous game.
However, a curator of the Museum of Victoria discovered an image in 2007, which may be the first
picture of an Australian football game, being played by Indigenous people near modern-day Mildura.
Prior to this discovery there have been numerous written testimonies. Tony Wright, a writer for the
Age newspaper compiled interesting sources in this intriguing article.

“The first observation of an Indigenous ball game was made in 1798 by David Collins, who had
arrived with the First Fleet as the colony's first deputy judge advocate. Then, in 1839, the first
Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District, William Thomas, wrote: "The Marn-Grook or Ball is
a favourite game with the boys and men.

"A party assemble, one makes a ball of opossum skin or fur of another animal of a large size, working
it over and over with the sinews of a kangaroo tail, the ball is kicked up in the air, not thrown up by
hand as white boys do, nor kicked along the ground, there is general excitement who shall catch it,
the tall fellows stand the best chance, when the ball is caught it is kicked up in the air again by the
one who caught it, it is sent with great force and ascends as straight up and as high as when thrown
by hand, they will play the game for hours and fine exercise it is for adults or youths."

One of the most lucid recollections of the game was given by James Dawson, an early pastoralist and
a fine friend of Indigenous people in Western Victoria.

"One of the favourite games is football, in which 50, or as many as 100 players engage at a time,"
Dawson recalled in 1881, describing a sinew-bound possum-skin ball filled with pounded charcoal.

"The players are divided into two sides and ranged in opposing lines, which are always of a different
'class' – white cockatoo against black cockatoo, quail against the snake, etc.”

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/australian-rules-roots-are-black-and-white-20150730-
gio3k8.html

In background, kids kicking the “footy”

Once a Parksider, Always a Parksider