How Melbourne has become one of the world’s great sporting cities since 1854

Seventeen days before the first edition of The Age was published in 1854, the first cricket match was played at what would become the MCG, between members of the Melbourne Cricket Club. The government had granted the club a site in the so-called Police Paddock a year previously, the land was cleared, and the first pavilion erected, with seating for 60.

Soon after that inaugural match, the 40th Regiment band played a late afternoon recital at the MCG. A week later, it confronted miners at the Eureka Stockade.

This was in the middle of a frenetic time in which Melbourne was not so much founded, as exploded, into being. It began with the discovery of gold in 1851. Within a decade, Victoria had a Constitution, a parliament and the beginnings of Parliament House, while Melbourne had a state library, a museum, a university, a cathedral and its first railway line.

Sport was sewn into this early fabric.

“The Melbourne Cricket Club hold their meetings in the [Richmond] paddock, and have erected a spacious club-house,” said an Age report from the “Melbourne in 1854” special, published on January 29, 1855.

“Upon grand days, such as a match with the Geelong and other clubs, the scene is very animated from the large concourse of ladies; and when a military band plays, the brilliant company and surrounding scenery forcibly call to mind the attractions of Kensington Gardens, and it is difficult to realise the fact that we are some 12,000 miles distant, in a colony but a few years in existence.”

The first intercolonial cricket match, between Victoria and New South Wales, was staged at the MCG in 1856 (and later, the first Test match), Melbourne and Geelong football clubs were formed – in 1858 and 1859 respectively – making them among the oldest football clubs in the world, and the first rudimentary Australian rules football matches were played at that time.

In 1861, the Melbourne Cup was run for the first time. The crowd was 4000, and it was suggested that this was less than expected because the race coincided with news reaching Melbourne of the death of explorers Burke and Wills five days earlier. Australia was still barely half explored by white settlers, but already most of the institutions that identify modern Melbourne were up and running.

The polish was still to come. In that first Cup, one horse bolted before the start, three fell during the race and two died. The winner, Archer, was an outsider from country NSW, who won another two-mile race the next day, and whose Cup triumph was said to “refuel interstate rivalry”.

Plus ca change …

“The Grand Stand was tolerably well filled, and with more than usual attendance of ladies; whilst on ‘the Hill’ (the price of admission having been reduced to one shilling for each day) the public crowded in large numbers,” The Age reported.

“… But for one unfortunate accident, which has terminated (or must terminate) fatally, so far as two of the running horses are concerned, and was nearly terminating fatally to their riders also, the day would have been one of unmixed enjoyment.”

This was a colony feeling its oats, and sport personified it. Tom Wills was a complex and flawed character who has lasting fame as the progenitor of Australian rules footy. In a letter to Bell’s Life in 1858 proposing the new winter code, Wills said it would benefit cricket grounds because the constant trampling would keep the turf “firm and durable”, and benefit cricketers lest in their inactivity their joints became “encased in useless superabundant flesh”.

Then there was this: “If it is not possible to form a football club, why should not these young men who have adopted this new-born country for their motherland, why I say, do not they form themselves into a rifle club, so at any rate they may be some day called upon to aid their adopted land against a tyrant’s band, that may some day ‘pop’ upon us when we least expect a foe at our very doors.”

But football it was. Australian rules did not so much grow out of other codes as up with all of them. That same year, Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar played a 40-a-side “game” using a round ball over three successive Saturday afternoons on a “ground” about 800 metres long in Yarra Park in what is looked upon as the game’s day dot. That day to this, the schools have played annually for the Cordner-Eggleston Cup. The first set of rules was formulated the next year.

By 1878, the schools were doing battle on the MCG. “After an exciting contest, [the match] resulted in a win for the College by one goal nil,” The Age reported.

Sport and Melbourne dwelled in one another from the start, physically, culturally and psychologically. Through sport, Melbourne asserted itself: a football code of our own and (proxying for the country) a lusty way of playing cricket that soon sat the motherland on its backside. It does still.

Melbourne staked an early claim to be the sporting capital of the world, and it still makes good that boast. The late newspaperman and Olympic chronicler, Harry Gordon, once declared the MCG to be “where the soul of Australian sport resides” and not even Sydney evangelist Peter V’Landys would dispute it.

Historians have identified several factors at work in this. The most obvious was wealth. As gold rush Melbourne blossomed into Marvellous Melbourne, the biggest city in Australia and the richest in the world for a time, it could indulge itself more than most. Racing became its own industry. Affluent Melbourne had earlier and more English-style “public” – ie, private – schools than Sydney, and they were hotbeds of the burgeoning cult of athleticism.

Geography was telling. Flatter than Sydney, Melbourne could stretch its legs in a way that Sydney could not. It made for more and bigger arenas – and crowds – easily reached by public transport. Still to this day, Melbourne is in essence a square of business and government, then a circle of interlinked stadiums, courses, courts and parks. In the middle is the pearl, the MCG, which is literally near and dear to the city’s heart.

Geoffrey Blainey posited in his Shorter History of Australia that this country was “possibly the first in the world to give a high emphasis to spectator sports”.

By the 1880s, footy was regularly drawing 15,000 people and in 1886, a South Melbourne-Geelong game attracted 34,000, “possibly the largest football crowd in the world up to that point”, said Blainey.

An Age reporter wrote that match, played at a packed South Melbourne Cricket Club, “was in every respect the most important and remarkable contest of the kind that has ever taken place in Australia”.

“The roofs of the pavilion, the scoring box were swarmed over … The whole of the pavilion enclosure was literally packed, and in the ladies’ reserve, everybody fortunate enough to obtain a seat turned it into a standing place,” the report said.

Vast crowds have franked Melbourne’s vocation for sport ever since.

Crucially, then and now, Australian rules drew proportionately far more women than other footy codes. Not coincidentally, footy crowds mostly conduct themselves with relative civility.

Meantime, up to a third of Melbourne’s population at the time went to the Melbourne Cup. Visiting in 1895, Mark Twain described Flemington as “the Mecca of Australasia” and Cup Day as “the Australasian national day … like no other specialised day in any country”. It still is.

Politics played a part. Melbourne was then, as it is now, the most progressive city in the country, forerunning land reform, secret ballots and labour laws. “Melbourne saw itself as a world leader of the movement for shorter hours of work,” wrote Blainey. In 1856, stonemasons won a 48-hour week, a milestone we commemorate still on Labour Day.

In due course, workers won a half-day off on Saturday, and began to fill their new leisure hours with sport. Work-life balance was born. “Saturday and sport supplanted Sunday and religion,” wrote Blainey. “Melbourne became, without quite realising it, one of the great sporting cities.” So it remains.

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