Football historian commended for his work looking at the AFL’s little-known history

Docklander Graham Pilkington has received a commendation at the Victorian Community History Awards for his journal article looking at the history behind one of Australia’s most popular and unique sports: Australian Rules Football.

The Unusual Australian Football Scoring System: Six Behinds to a Goal asks questions most footy followers likely take for granted, exploring the first four pioneering decades of the AFL, and, specifically, why a scoring system that awards missing came to be.

The idea for the project began at the AFL House in Docklands, the national headquarters of the sport. Mr Pilkington told Docklands News that, following a visit there, he discovered there seemed to be limited knowledge about the iconic sport.

“I was talking to three historians, all distinguished guys, and I asked them why a goal is worth six points”, he said, adding that, “to my surprise, they didn’t have an answer for me.”

When Mr Pilkington initially began researching, he confirmed that there was little research on the topic, made more surprising through the uniqueness of the scoring system.

“No other professional sport has a system like it, where it rewards a near miss, but no one had looked at it more than superficially,” he said.

He decided to be the one to fill this gap, initially writing what he described as a “jokey piece”, before deciding that was a “waste” of the research and converting it into an academic journal article.

Since its publication in the Victorian Historical Journal, it was shortlisted for the Victorian Community History Awards held in Southbank last month, which were hosted by Public Record Office Victoria and the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.

Much of his research involved trawling though old newspapers, and reading old copies of rules, the first being written in 1859. He traced the development of the behind, starting with the advent of it being recorded, but not counted within the score to “show which team was more dominant and to give journalists of the time something to write about”.

Mr Pilkington knows his stuff about football and has lots of interesting facts to share. For example, he said footy originally developed to give the “lazy cricketers something to do in the winter”, and used to be played on a square field, with only the two goal posts and no points posts. A behind was a point scored when the ball landed outside the posts “behind goal”.

From the “high marking and high kicking game familiar today” to the now distant variation of AFL that would continue until one team kicked two goals, sometimes lasting all afternoon, Mr Pilkington believes understanding where you came from is key to truly knowing why the game endures to this day.

“If you know where you’ve come from, it helps understanding where you are at the moment”, he said, before adding that this was not his only project on the little researched origins of AFL.

Other research includes the reasoning behind goal posts being a certain number of yards apart, and an examination of the Geelong Football Club post-World War One, in which two teams were entered alongside each other.

For the duration of his research, he was based in Docklands, reflecting that it was “a very nice place to live”, before adding that it “felt like a bit of a holiday when you come outside and see all the water with the boats on it”.

As for footy, Docklands is also an ideal location, with Marvel Stadium being in “a great position for all the teams and public transport next to Southern Cross [Station]. It’s great,” Mr Pilkington said.

“They’ve got a roof on a 50,000-seater ground. I mean, a lot of places don’t even have 50,000 seaters - we have one with a roof.” •