Several weeks ago, Robert Walls made the most momentous decision of his life. Facing death from cancer in a matter of months, he would curtail the suffering and hasten his exit through Victoria’s voluntary assisted dying laws.
Walls, one of Australian rules football’s most fabled figures as player, coach and media figure, died on Thursday in his East Melbourne apartment, in a medically supervised death, surrounded by his sister Annette and three children. He was 74.
Robert Walls, one of the most fabled figures in Australian football.Credit: Getty Images
His son, David Walls, confirmed to this masthead that his father had chosen the path of voluntary assisted dying after a struggle with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia that began in late September 2023.
His father had spent about 270 days in hospital, gaining some respite from the disease in 2024 and prolonging his life with treatment that gave him cherished time with his children and seven grandchildren.
But the cancer returned forcefully this year. Robert had been told he had three to four months to live.
David Walls said his father’s decision, made “about a month ago”, was influenced by witnessing the death of his late wife Erin – the mother of David, Rebecca and Daniel. Erin died from lung cancer, despite being a non-smoker, in 2006.
Robert Walls and his dog, Gus, pictured in 2015.Credit: Joe Armao
“He did an enormous job,” David Walls said of his father’s care for his mother before her death. “I think that [Erin’s death] may have influenced his decision as well.”
To comply with the voluntary assisted dying laws, Walls required the approval of three doctors. His death was hastened through the administration of a lethal drink, at his home, where Walls had spent the last several weeks following his decision.
Walls with Carlton players Jon Dorotich, Peter Bosustow and Stephen Kernahan.Credit: Getty Images
That Walls would die soon, at a time of his choosing, was known to many of his friends within the football and media fraternities. A number of former Carlton teammates, and players he coached at Carlton, Fitzroy and the Brisbane Bears, visited him in his final weeks and embraced him for the last time.
Paul Roos, the former Fitzroy champion for whom Walls was a seminal influence, flew from Hawaii to see Walls last week, while ex-Brisbane great Michael “Magic” McLean travelled from Darwin to see his old coach for the last time. Carlton teammates Peter “Percy” Jones and Geoff Southby visited him in recent days, as did his 1987 premiership player David Rhys-Jones and prominent football journalist Mike Sheahan.
Scott Clayton, who played under Walls at Fitzroy and then was persuaded to join the coach in Brisbane as a recruiter/list manager for several years, said that outside of his family, Walls “has been the greatest influence on my life”.
Clayton added: “He supported, he believed in you as person.”
David Barham, the television executive and current Essendon president who hired Walls as a panellist on Seven’s ground-breaking Talking Footy show and then enlisted him to Ten’s commentary team, said of his close friend: “I’ll miss him a lot. He was one of the best people I’ve met in my life.”
Walls was, in Clayton’s words, “frank and fearless with the truth, honest to a fault” – a description consistent with that of anyone who dealt with him as coach or commentator.
This renowned candour was reflected in the often searing columns he wrote for The Age and in the expert comments he delivered on radio and television.
It was this trait that prompted Barham to enlist Walls in the Essendon coach selection process that settled on Brad Scott in 2022. “I knew he would tell me the truth,” said Barham. “I knew what I would get was factual and truthful, and he wouldn’t be swayed by anyone.”
Carlton’s Stephen Kernahan and Robert Walls with the ’87 premiership cup.
Barham, Clayton, David Walls (who is head of player personnel for Fremantle), McLean, and ex-Carlton and Melbourne Cricket Club chief executive Stephen Gough will speak at a celebration of Walls’ life at the MCG, as he requested.
A key member of Carlton’s storied 1968, 1970 and 1972 premiership teams, and a star centre half-forward, Walls was a school teacher who turned to coaching after ending his playing days with Fitzroy.
He became an innovative coach with the Lions, where he pioneered the use of “the huddle” at kick-ins and established close bonds with players. These included Clayton, the late Matthew Rendell, Mick Conlan, future coaches Roos and Ross Lyon and several others.
Walls coached the impecunious yet spirited Fitzroy to finals in 1981, 1983 and 1984, and returned to Carlton, as prodigal son, in the famed coach swap with David Parkin (who went from Carlton to Fitzroy) after 1985.
Arriving alongside boom recruits Stephen Kernahan, Craig Bradley, Peter Motley and Jon Dorotich, the tactically adroit Walls coached the Blues to a grand final in his first season (1986) and then delivered a premiership to Princes Park in 1987. After missing the grand final in 1988 (third), the Blues slumped in 1989, prompting the mid-season sacking of Walls by the ruthless regime of (president) John Elliott and (chief executive) Ian Collins.
Hired by the Brisbane Bears after 1990 when that dysfunctional club was a font of ridicule, Walls is credited with building a platform for a team that, as the Lions (post-merger with Fitzroy), became one of the greatest in competition history, winning a treble of flags in 2001-03 under Leigh Matthews.
Walls (centre) at Brisbane Bears training in 1993.
While he bequeathed a greatly improved and talented team at Brisbane after 1995, Walls found controversy when it emerged that he had authorised the pummelling, in the boxing ring, of player Shane Strempel as a disciplinary measure in 1991.
He also wrote with powerful insight about some of football’s modern greats, including Nathan Buckley, Michael Voss and Jason Akermanis, all of whom he coached at the Bears.
Robert Walls and Frank Gumbleton slug it out in 1976.Credit: The Age
It says much about the scale of Walls’ career that his ill-fated and brief stint coaching Richmond (1996-97) is a footnote to his other achievements.
In addition to his coaching and commentary, Walls mentored coaches such as Lyon and Roos and was instrumental, as a coach-search panel member, in the Saints hiring Lyon in 2006, and in the Bulldogs’ appointment of Rodney Eade (2004).
Walls’ formative coach was the great Ron Barassi, who had sought permission from Walls’ mother to select the skinny 16-year-old for his first game for the Blues in 1967 because Walls’ father had just died.
“He was a god to us,” Walls said of Barassi when he died in 2023, aged 87.
Recruited from Coburg Amateurs locally, Walls absorbed the precepts of team-first discipline from Barassi and later cited his coach as influential in his emphasis on attacking, risk-taking football.
Graceful, mobile, rugged, and skilled for 193 centimetres, Walls was an exceptional player for the Blues, booting 367 goals in 218 games; judged best afield in the 1972 grand final, when he booted six goals, Walls would have likely won the Norm Smith Medal had the award existed then. Crossing to Fitzroy in 1978, he added 41 games for an aggregate of 259 matches and 444 goals.
He is survived by his three children, seven grandchildren, and sister Annette.
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