The commentary at the end of the video says the Fitzroy faithful dare dream of their first premiership in 35 years.

I wish that was what we were dreaming for today!

In 1979 it didn’t seem so long ago since Fitzroy had last won a premiership in 1944. I thought we would win a flag between 1979 and 1986, but it wasn’t to be.

In this match on June 30, 1979, Fitzroy 20.16.136 d South Melbourne 15.20.110 at the Lake Oval in front of 13,862 fans.

The video is noteworthy for the fact that neither club plays home games in Melbourne any more.

And here’s a great video of Fitzroy v Hawthorn from 1978. The Lions won by one point, with Carlton recruit Robert Walls (and future coach) kicking the winning goal.

I remember him as one of the most consistent players for Fitzroy in 1995-96. He was a reliable defender who floated across half-back and initiated many attacking moves.

I thought he was the best of the club’s recruits.

However, Steven’s son Billy, 14, is in line to be considered as a “father-son” selection for Melbourne if he makes the grade.

Regarding his distinguished father, Wikipedia states:

A wingman, Stretch won the 1987 Keith “Bluey” Truscott Medal for the Demon’s best and fairest player. Stretch also played in 13 finals for the Demons including the 1988 VFL grand final. In 1994 he was traded to Fitzroy in the pre-season draft and played his final two seasons at the club.

He was a great contributor at Fitzroy, which may be overlooked by some given the club’s demise.

I certainly thanked God every time Steven roamed across half back to repel an opposition attack.

I hope Billy does well, albeit I would rather see him in West Adelaide colors, or with the Lions.

As a footnote, I recall Steven being in the mix as a possible coach of Myrtleford in 1997. I’m not sure where he ended up that year, if anywhere.

This shows Smith Street, with Fitzroy on the left and Collingwood on the right.

Some of the crowd watching a Fitzroy v South Melbourne game at the Brunswick Street Oval.

The Brunswick Street Oval.

A tram heading to the football. It was probably taken in Richmond, but I’m intrigued by the lacrosse stick. Lacrosse was a popular sport in early Melbourne, I believe.

It was more than half way through the season, with North on top of the ladder and Fitzroy third.

Fitzroy totally obliterated the Kangaroos to win 34.16.220 to 10.10.70. I’m pretty sure it was the highest winning margin ever recorded against a ladder-leading side.

The current AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou played for North Melbourne in that game, probably one he would rather forget. Ruckman Matt Rendell booted eight goals for the Lions, Mick Conlan and Bernie Quinlan seven each.

Here’s a clip showing two of Conlan’s goals:

Conlan is best remembered for kicking the winning goal in the 1986 elimination final against Essendon:

The only other cinematic reference to Fitzroy Football Club that I’m aware of is a segment in The Club showing highlights of a semi-final against Collinggwood.

Here’s the Waters’ quote:

I really liked the article, 1944 And All That, about the post-war era while Fitzroy still played at the Brunswick Street Oval.

I’ve heard stories about that era, but it’s great to see them written: the parochialism, the fights on the hill, the drunks, the police, attacks on the umpires, etc.

Here’s an extended extract:

Behind the goals and in the outer there was often more action than on the field. From 1858 newspaper reports of inner-suburban matches often took the larrikin element to task for its bias and violence. To policeman Bert Hope, who began duty in the uniformed branch at Fitzroy in 1930, Saturdays at the football was Fitzroy playing:

“If you wanted to take someone down from the country to see something, you’d take them there to the Fitzroy ground and you’d see it. They wouldn’t be disappointed. You could see anything – you’d see drunks, of course, you could see them any time, but you’d see some of the women, the prostitutes and their cousins – they were the ones who didn’t have any set houses – and then the decent women…The men’d be just about the same – the larrikin element, they’d be the mob who’d go to the football. What you’d call the buck larrikins’d go to the goal at Fitzroy’s end, and you’d get these certain type of girls that were like the buck larrikins, you know what I mean, only they’d be girls, they’d be with them behind the goals. Then of course, there were the decent men.

“Everybody would be there, except the real criminal – now, he wouldn’t bother about going to the football. He’d have other things to do – S.P-ing at a pub somewhere; the real criminal, they wouldn’t bother with the football.”

An artist's impression of Brunswick Street Oval in Melbourne, circa 1907.

To Bert, it seemed that the policing of the buck larrikins and their women behind the goals was the Saturday equivalent of being on the beat.

“I knew them well…in the uniform branch you’d deal with the buck larrikins – tough animals, get around in their half dozen or so. Very seldom see one on his own, you’d see six…They’d go along Smith Street, Fitzroy, to the Cum Ming Café and they’d worry hell out of the poor old Chinaman. They’d not only refuse to pay for their meal, but they’d pinch a chook out of the window, they’d bash his window in and pinch it. See, the Chinese restaurants – the Cum Ming – used to have in the windows, oh beautiful, succulent cooked chooks, you know, and they’d knock a chook off. If there was a break-in, once a week on average in Smith Street, it could have been the Collingwood bucks, could have been the Fitzroy bucks, or could have been criminals.”

On the beat, no revolvers were issued and Bert Hope depended on his fists: ‘I could hold me own because I was very solid. I wasn’t awkward you know and you just had to use your tongue.’ The Brunswick Street Oval was another site for the working out of old antagonisms. But there, the police always felt at a disadvantage: ‘That’s one of the worst jobs you can get in the police force, in front of a crowd, football especially, you know, arresting one of their mob, like a good barracker for Fitzroy…’

Plenty of fights

Apart from the antagonism towards the police, behind the goals was a place where men were men. Even if you were not good with your fists, to get behind the goals was to assure yourself of a lively time. While Les Moulton was never in the fights – ‘Oh no, I was never in them’ – even on the periphery, there was action:

“There was plenty of fights. There was one fellow in Fitzroy called Ginger Allcock – Ginger Mick we used to call him – an old fighter, but he was knocked about that bad, the brain, you know…and I’m behind the goals one day and someone says something to him and he went bang to this bloke, and he missed the bloke and hit me. In them days there was a wooden fence at Brunswick Street with wire on the top so you couldn’t get in. He knocked me right down beneath it. He said, ‘Billy’ – he called me Billy – ‘Billy, Billy, I’m sorry. Billy, Billy…’”

Other fights were more willing, and Bert Hope, as the policeman on duty, would have to distinguish between the ordinary and the serious: ‘I’ve seen some fellows come down the hill covered in blood, you’d think they were badly injured, you know, but they wouldn’t be, just a gashed hand, or a black eye, a blood nose or something. Now, I’ve seen plenty of that…’

It was especially ‘rowdy whenever Fitzroy played Collingwood, whenever that was on or Richmond’, and then Bert Hope would be particularly busy:

“When a fight started they’d come down the hill. The ground was all right, but on the side it’d slope up, you know what I mean, so that those on the top could see, and when there was a fight the crowd would just completely disperse and whoever was fighting would come down to the pickets and when they got to the pickets, I’d take charge of them.”

At the time, Bert was in the middle of it: “You’d have your helmet on all the time…things’d always be that hot or you’d be fighting that much you wouldn’t feel anything hitting you.”

Bert chose not to take his baton – “it might be used on me” – and would have preferred that the fighters sort it out themselves: “To be quite candid, if you’d let it go on, they’d probably knock off after about ten minutes, but you couldn’t let it go on because among those people, there’d be some very decent people. Do you follow? And they’d think what the devil are the police doing allowing this to go on. So you’d hop in and do something.”

There Bert was, then, saving the goal umpire from being assaulted, seeing that the number of footballs getting pinched after they came through the goals was kept to a respectable three or four a match, and at the end when “the crowd would just erupt and stream on to the ground, there’d always be one or two among them that would like to dong the umpire – you know, from the losing team – so we had to make sure he wasn’t hit…there was a always a chance around there at Fitzroy that they’d be knocked, you know …”

• The site at maroonandblue.com.au was down when checked on December 27, 2011. The links will be reinstated if the site becomes active again.

Several months ago I converted to YouTube “The Ballad of Haydn Bunton” by Ken Mansell and Peter Bell.

I conceded at the time I was probably breaching copyright, and if Ken didn’t like it he could let me know.

Ken discovered the video recently and caned me with the soft end of a feather duster.

Suitably chastened, I accepted the rebuke and was pleased to receive from Ken his speech notes to the launch of the song. I offered to publish them here with attribution and Ken agreed.

The speech was made on July 9, 2003 at Haskins Hotel in Rae Street, North Fitzroy.

With Ken Mansell’s kind permission, I reprint the remarks here in full:

By Ken Mansell

As the author of a song eulogising a great Fitzroy footballer I believe it may be appropriate to begin my reflections on the Haydn Bunton ballad by confessing that I am not, nor have I ever been, a dyed-in-the-wool Fitzroy barracker.

I have in fact barracked for the Geelong Football Club for fifty years. This particular club loyalty was irrelevant when it came to writing the song. The code of Australian football invented by Tom Wills has flourished for almost 150 years. No doubt, the tribal tradition of one-eyed passion for a particular club has been one main cause of this longevity. However, love for the game itself, and for its traditions and skills, meaning that we can rise to applaud all the great players, has been equally important.

GEELONG

I should never have become a Geelong supporter. There was no family association with far-off Geelong. My father, born in Essendon, was a Don. I can remember the football broadcasts on our loungeroom wireless, and over by the open fireplace my father talking excitedly about John Coleman. This was 1950. Essendon in 1950 were to complete successive ( back-to-back ) premierships.

My interest in football began about this time. I was four years old. I became hooked on the coloured football action (and composed VFL/VFA team) photographs in The Argus and the VFL/VFA footy cards that magically appeared in the cellophane of our Kornies packets.

The intensification of my interest in footy coincided with the rise of a new football dominance. In the 1952 season Geelong, who had “stolen” the 1951 premiership from a Coleman-less Essendon, set out on their record-breaking run of 23 consecutive victories (in fact 26 consecutive matches without defeat as one of the 26 matches was drawn). Geelong topped it all off by winning the 1952 premiership. Forsaking Essendon, I jumped on the bandwagon of the Cats.

1952 was the year when my interest in football started to become an absorbing passion. I began a scrapbook into which I pasted all the wonderful coloured action photographs that I had snipped from The Argus. Such was the impression made by 1952 that the VFL ladder of that year was imprinted indelibly on my mind. So indelibly and completely that I found myself, whenever called upon down the years to perform a ”party trick”, able to recite the twelve VFL teams’ 1952 ladder finishing order in about four seconds.

FITZROY

The impact of 1952 probably partly explains why, at the same time that Geelong was being consolidated as my number one, Fitzroy became my second team. Collingwood, as runners-up, threatened more than any other my new allegience to Geelong. The team that finished third were good enough to tantalise the imagination of a youngster emotionally responding only to upperdogs (and yet to become the underdog supporter of later years) but they offered less of a threat.

Fitzroy were third in 1952, although only just. (The first semi-final victory over Carlton was achieved when 1950 Brownlow Medallist Allan The Baron Ruthven kicked the winning score in the dying moments of a nail-biting finish).

But it was the fascination with the Fitzroy jumper that was the clincher! Maroon and blue were made for one another and I was very impressed by them. In those days, Fitzroy were the Gorillas, but no matter: in The Argus colour shots, Fitzroy players seemed particularly dashing in their maroon and blue, with white ankle straps peeping out of their boots. The 1952 Kornies cards – Don Furness, Jack Gervasoni and George Coates – offered more rich Fitzroy colour.

Until 1957 we lived in Camberwell. In the very early fifties, my father would occasionally take the tram to Hawthorn, and then walk to the Glenferrie Oval, to see the hapless local VFL team – Hawthorn – receive another thumping. Hawthorn lost every match in 1950!

Sometime in 1951 or 1952 my father began taking me to some of the Hawthorn home games. He remarked that the Glenferrie ground was like a “sardine tin”. There were several ways of getting into the ground. The most exciting way was to come through the turnstiles in the tunnel under the railway line on the southern side of the ground.

You then had to sit in the elevated but narrow little outer along the rail line and put up with the trains clacketty-clacking past you every half an hour. Or you could come in from Glenferrie Road and stand in the outer section behind the goals at the eastern end. This was great. You saw a lot of the play when Hawthorn were defending the outer goal.

I loved hearing the crisp cracking sound made when Len Crane, the Hawthorn full back, kicked off. A big booming drop-kick every time, to a far-off pack on the wing. My father would point out some of the players to me. At a match between Hawthorn and Carlton, he pointed to one and said “That’s Chooka Howell”.

On another occasion, Hawthorn were playing Fitzroy at Glenferrie. This time we were sitting on the railway wing. Pointing to 1950 Brownlow Medallist Ruthven, Dad exclaimed: “That’s the Baron!”. The spectacle and the theatre of this particular match made a deep impression on me, and so did the Fitzroy colours.

And so, for me, for reasons to do mainly with aesthetics, Fitzroy was the “second team”. In later years, as the nomadic old club struggled through one insecure season after another, many were to adopt Fitzroy as their second team. After all this insecurity, you could probably hardly blame Fitzroy for opportunistically going along with the VFL’s Footscray merger proposal in 1989.

At the time, Fitzroy’s implication in the ultimately abortive merger definitely dampened my sympathy for the club’s predicament. Still, along with thousands who value the game’s hallowed traditions as much as we value our club of first choice, I was devastated by the final destruction of Fitzroy in 1996. However, none of this, not a word of it, explains why, one day in August 1999, I chose to write a song about a great Fitzroy footballer.

Haydn Bunton tribute

I grew up with a deep interest in the history of Australian Rules Football. This was initially developed by reading the five football publications published by The Argus in the early fifties. Later, it grew into a love of history in general.

At Monash University in 1968, the “labour historian” Ian Turner, of “Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture” fame, announced his intention of writing a history of the game (in fact the first scholarly history of the game – Up Where Cazaly?).

Seized by temporary insanity, I visited Turner at his home in Lennox Street, Richmond, one afternoon and handed over (forever, as it turned out!) my once beloved Argus books. My lingering fascination with Haydn Bunton started with those books. I can remember taking particular note of the laudatory comments about Bunton in these publications.

See for instance “That Quicksilver Man called Haydn Bunton”, Football Headlines, circa April 1955. This particular Argus publication, produced only weeks before Bunton’s death, was written by Hugh Buggy, Percy Taylor, and Peter Banfield. I vaguely remember that the the footballer’s premature death in 1955 hit the football world like a thunderclap.

The latter-day AFL has instituted a commemorative institution called the Hall of Fame and installed some former great players as “Legends”. It might be more correct to describe these players as “Myths”. What do we know of them? Footballers, until relatively recently, did not publish memoirs. Nor did ( or could ) they speak into the tape recorders of oral historians. Because they, and those who ran the sport in yesteryears, seem not to have left memoirs (or other material of an intellectual nature) to posterity we know very little about footballers in the past.

What we do know is gleaned from tales (including, of course, contemporary newspaper reports) of their on-field football exploits. These tales have been told by others – more so than told by themselves. We therefore know something of what the players achieved on the football field but we know next to nothing about them personally.

Haydn Bunton was no shrinking violet. He was conspicuous and available in a number of different ways. On the field certainly, but also on the floor at Foys in the city, and on the airwaves and in print. With his newspaper column and his own regular 3DB radio program (and later radio programs in Perth and Adelaide) Bunton was the footy media star of his day. There are also suggestions of egoism in Bunton. But even he did not (to my knowledge) leave us an autobiography, having died before it became acceptable for footballers to do so. It is hardly surprising that there is a mystique about Bunton and other leading footballers.

Richmond’s Jack Dyer has a well-deserved reputation for inadvertently, as a radio and TV broadcaster, mangling the English language. Ironically, therefore, it is Jack Dyer, in his own pioneering autobiography Captain Blood, who has written (or ghost-written) the most evocative descriptions of Haydn Bunton, as he appeared to Dyer on and off the field. In writing my song, I drew on Dyer’s comments more than any other source.

What has emerged about Bunton seemed perfect for a song. He was a romantic figure, in all senses of the word. Dodging knucklemen on the football field, he was a symbol of good triumphing over evil. Adored by female fans for his matinee idol looks (Dyer’s comparison is with Rudolf Valentino) Bunton perhaps had as much in common with the Errol Flynn pirate character of “Captain Blood” than Jack Dyer himself did. Also, Bunton died before his time. The fatal car accident in Gawler seems to have been caused by Bunton’s desire to help those less fortunate than himself.

The way that Bunton created, for Fitzroy people at least, excitement (if not hope) in the midst of thirties economic despair invites a comparison with Don Bradman. The matrix from which Aussie Football’s Bradman emerged was not altogether different from the cricketer’s.

Like Bradman, Bunton was a country boy. As a seventeen year-old, Bunton took his place alongside young Bradman in a NSW Country X1 against a more senior NSW X1 and apparently so impressed that great cricket judge Monty Noble that he was rated by Noble as a more likely candidate for future Test selection than Bradman and Archie Jackson.

See “That Quicksilver Man called Haydn Bunton”, Football Headlines, circa April 1955. Later, when Bunton arrived in Melbourne, Bill Ponsford approached him to join St Kilda Cricket Club. Of course, Bradman continued his cricketing career; Bunton did not.

One particularly fascinating story about Bunton stood out above all others, and more than any other part of the Bunton myth provided the essential ingredient for a song. I found it in Mavis Thorpe Clark’s biography of the great aboriginal leader Doug Nicholls (and also in The First One Hundred Years, a history of the Fitzroy Football Club by Sutherland et al).

I was profoundly moved when I read about Bunton’s gesture of friendship in the Fitzroy dressing room towards the diminutive aboriginal. Nicholls, a skilled and lightning-fast wingman, was newly-arrived from Carlton (where he had been snubbed) and from Northcote’s champion VFA team. As possibly the only black man in senior football in Melbourne, what supreme courage he must have had to face on-field taunts and dressing-room ostracism! In later years, Nicholls stood out as a spokesman for his people. His greatness was finally acknowledged when he was appointed Governor of South Australia.

Bunton’s greatness consisted in the fact he had supreme football skills but it was augmented by his display of charity and humanity to his Aboriginal teammate. (The charity seems to have been reciprocated – Bunton became one of a group of Fitzroy players attending Nicholls’ Church Parade).

Today, we hear a lot about reconciliation between the races and reconciliation between the races in football. Black footballers like Che Cockatoo Collins, Michael Long and Nicky Winmar, who have worked against the grain to establish the rights of Aboriginal footballers, have been justly applauded. But what have white footballers done? It seemed to me that there was perhaps a great untold story of white footballers working against the grain of racism and in their own way pioneering reconciliation long before it was fashionable.

THE SONG

There seems to be an unwritten law that football songs should be comic or humorous, or at least not too serious. There also seems to be an unspoken assumption that football songs (and sport generally) should avoid the discussion of serious social themes. Perhaps this is because of the pervasive, male locker-room, larrikin tradition of shying away from the expression of emotion.

I felt this tradition as a barrier to be overcome before the Bunton song was possible. Football songs do not have to be overtly political to be good – take Mike Brady’s classic “Up there Cazaly”: now not far from being a genuine Australian folk song. But many football songs are ephemeral because they assidously avoid social comment.

I wrote the Bunton song in outright rebellion against the genre of football songs of the “There’s only one Tony Lockett” type. I tried to pack in as much social history as possible – the depression years, racism on and off the field, footy as an expression of (Fitzroy) community, the commercialisation of the sport.

In recent years, there has been an acceleration in the movement of football away from its social – that is, its suburban and community – roots. Footy has become a part of “the spectacle” and the larger entertainment industry (particularly television). Certainly football is now an industry in its own right, and “money rules as king”. In the most recent period, a little sub-industry has been developing within the belly of the AFL as an integral part of club marketing strategies. We have AFL Halls of Fame, club Halls of Fame, AFL Teams of the Century, club Teams of the Century, and, like some footy version of the Top Forty, The Best Sixty Players in the History of Such-and-Such.

Central to the sub-industry is the comparison of great footballers across different eras. Books based on these comparisons are great money-spinners and marketing tools. They probe bottomless wells of nostalgia. They look wonderful on coffee-tables. They provoke interesting and never-ending arguments. As my ever-growing library (and ever-diminishing bank balance) will attest, I love them.

But from the point of view of History, the comparisons are really analytically untenable. How can Thurgood be compared (quantitatively or qualitatively) with Ablett? Reynolds with Carey? Pratt with Dunstall? In the end, it really just comes down to a subjective choice, a personal point of view.

In mid-1999, Melbourne’s Herald-Sun newspaper (following in the tradition initiated by Greg Hobbs and Scott Palmer) solemnly published a list of the best-ever footballers in order of merit, with Hawthorn’s Leigh Matthews as the No. 1.

The absurd pseudo-objectivity of this poll was the catalyst that sparked, at last, my song. I decided to declare my hand, and to do so in full consciousness that I was being totally subjective – expressing my own values.

Just as my favourite modern footballer is not some Geelong player but, of all things, a Carlton player – Brent Crosswell – so my greatest all-time footballer also had to be someone who could be shown to have worked, and not purely on the football field, against the grain. Embedded in the song is the notion that human qualities, not just on-field performance, ought to count for something in the estimation of football greatness.

At time of writing, the still-extant Fitzroy Football Club is petitioning the AFL to help fund the erection of a statue of Bunton at the Brunswick Street Oval. Bunton will join Ted Whitten and other sportspeople who have been monumentalised. My song also puts the Fitzroy footballer on a pedestal.

Anything unsettling, or incongruous with the image of perfection, has been scraped off the portrait. Bunton had his detractors. For Dyer, he was the ”umpire’s pet”. Turner called him a ”seraph”. I was shocked to read in a book on the history of Norwood Football Club that Bunton had hectored Haydn Junior from the boundary like a bad tempered schoolmaster.

I wondered what to make of the oft-mentioned opinion that Bunton, winning games for Fitzroy “off his own boot”, was footy’s (first?) supreme individualist. I chose to ignore his connection to the payments scandal of 1930.I also had to ignore the apparent truth that Bunton’s kicking prowess was barely above average! Of course, wherever old men gather, some do not say Bunton. Some say Coleman, or Reynolds, or Pratt.

And not all have a gleam in their eye. But can you imagine us, or anyone else, singing that?

My comment: Many thanks to Ken Mansell for sharing his memories, creativity and voice to honour Haydn Bunton, Australia’s greatest ever footballer.

Fitzroy left the AFL in 1996 so quality video is hard to come by.

I came across this clip tonight, which I think is from a game in 1991. Whatever the year, I remember coach Robert Shaw taking the team across to supporters at three-quarter-time for a rev-up and getting the win.

I was listening on radio from interstate … I think this is rare video footage from the game:

Bunton was probably the greatest ever Australian footballer. Even though his performances are now beyond living memory for most people, he still rates in the top 10 all-time players when people compile those lists.

He won three Brownlow Medals playing for Fitzroy in the VFL and three Sandover Medals with Subiaco in Western Australia.

Thanks to Yahoo! Answers I figured out how to add a picture to an audio file, which enabled me to upload the track to You Tube. Hopefully I haven’t breached copyright in doing that. Ken can let me know if I have.

It’s a great tribute song: