AUSTRALIAN RULES FOOTBALL – CULTURE, POLITICS – Americanising Australian Footy?
by Sasha Uzunov
The Australian Football League-the governing body of Australian Rules Football-and its many predecessors – the Victorian Football League, Victorian Football Association, Australasian National Football Council- has always been a key political player offering public support to powerful elites in British Colonial Victoria and later Australia, even unashamedly changing patrons along the way to further its goals. The AFL now has become a platform for the United States’ State Department (Foreign Affairs Ministry) and its cultural and political agenda in Australia.
If you control popular culture and sport, you control public opinion.
Many younger Australians would be surprised to learn at how British a cultural institution the AFL (VFL and VFA) was in Australia and its leading role in mobilising young Australians to fight for the British Empire in WWI. That conflict, especially the Gallipoli campaign of 25 April 1915, became the basis of Australia’s national legend, its foundation myth, the Anzac Legend.
Reading the AFL’s modern, US style corporate version of its own “history” you would never have realised its original “Britishness.” In its place, the AFL has emphasised women, multiculturalism and indigenous Australians, which in principal is an excellent and long overdue move but in reality is tokenistic- it’s a clever way to hide its embracing of US corporate culture, and the spiritual homeland of Wall Street and the lingo and mindset that goes with it.
If the AFL supports indigenous Australians it can’t at the same time deliberately associate itself with the US government, the US State Department’s Deep State to be more precise, and manifestations of white American cultural hegemony, such as the US NFL, which has a bad record when it comes to native indigenous American Indians and African Americans. Moreover, the US opposes Aboriginal Land Rights in Australia’s Northern Territory, especially the sensitive Pine Gap, the location of the US spy base.
Just listen to a media conference held by the AFL or an after match Q and A with coaches – it’s as though you’re a shareholder/stakeholder attending an AGM (Annual General Meeting) of some US multi-national company. The CEO delivers an address using every Harvard Business School phrase or term in the book. Never mind the plethora of US sports terms such as the Basketball “turnover” which means loss of possession or the baseball “thrown a curveball,” etc. which have entered the vocabulary In comparison, US sports commentators don’t use Australian terms when commenting on sports.The great British writer George Orwell warned us about how language is used for political control and or indoctrination, brainwashing to put it crudely.
THE BRITISHNESS OF BROWNLOW – THE CONTRADICTORY CULT OF CHARLES
–Comment: Sasha Uzunov, Editor, Alternate Comms
Many Australians regard their unique national sport of Australian Rules Football as a religion, a cult. Charles Brownlow (junior) could be said to be the game’s equivalent of a prophet, a saint, a Lord High Priest.
He is venerated with a gold medal, a quasi-religious talisman, named in his honour for the fairest and player in the Australian Football League (AFL) competition. But at the same time his ethnic and cultural heritage, his Britishness, is hated by the AFL. No other cult, religion, philosophy or ideology has a hero who is simultaneously loved and hated.
AFL and AFL clubs ban Britishness because of “colonialism” but as mentioned previously the AFL paradoxically promotes US nationalism which has colonial issues with native Americans (Indians). AFL has a long standing relationship with the US NFL, dating back to the late 1970s and engineered by the US State Department. The US NFL has for decades been condemned by native Americans for its, the NFL’s, nasty neo-colonial, racist behaviour. An NFL team is called the Buffalo Bills, named for an American historical figure from the Wild West era, Buffalo Bill Cody, “famous” for killing native Americans!
The AFL (or Victorian Football League as it was known until 1990) was established in 1896 Colonial Victoria by Australians who regarded themselves as “Britishers.”
Legally, it became Australian only in 1949 with the establishment of an Australian Citizenship/Nationality. But culturally the VFL remained British well into the 1970s, banning Advance Australia Fair, Australia’s nationalist song which later became the country’s national anthem, in the 1974 finals series. Only God Save the Queen was permitted to be played before finals matches.
Twelve of the 18 VFL/AFL clubs were founded by Britishers in Australia.
But who was Charles Brownlow junior (1861-1924) ?
He was an Australian Britisher born in the town of Geelong, in the British Colony of Victoria, Australia in 1861 to English settler parents. His father Charles senior was from Oxford and his mother from Essex. Charles senior was a staunch British monarchist as was his son Charles junior.
Brownlow junior became active in sports such as rowing and the then Australian Rules Football, still in its genesis period. By trade he was a jeweller and watch maker of some considerable standing. Brownlow’s stature in his local community of Geelong was tied to involvement with the Geelong Football and Cricket Club, first as a player of some distinction and ability and later as a wise, powerful administrator. He would also be involved in the governing body, the VFL, as its Vice-President and towards the end of life as acting President.
Brownlow and Geelong Football and Cricket club were very active in promoting Britishness. During WWI, Brownlow and an other Geelong Football official, the club President A.H. Bowman spearheaded a fundraising drive for a hospital to be built in Geelong to “honour” the British Empire’s greatest military hero Lord Kitchener.