Alternate Comms field team research unit !
Comment by Sasha Uzunov, Editor of Alternate Comms
Last Sunday, 11 August 2024, I drove two hours from Melbourne to the central Victorian town of Maryborough, a former gold ming centre. My interest was to find the grave of Tom Banks, an extraordinary man.
We have seen members of Australia’s African community take up playing Australian Rules Football at the highest level, AFL competition. This is fantastic.
But I’m baffled why the AFL doesn’t promote one of its 1896 founders Tom Banks, born to an African father Jourdan who escaped from slavery in United States of America in 1850s and ended up in British Australia via British Canada and England and granted political freedom ! It’s an extraordinary life story, worthy of a Hollywood film.
It would also “assist” in boosting history tourism to Maryborough & traditional Victorian gold mining areas. I’m baffled why Victorian State govt & local Central Goldfields Shire Council haven’t promoted local son Tom Banks, a founder of AFL (VFL) in 1896.
– The Australian Football League known as the AFL (until 1990 known as the Victorian Football League-VFL) is the major governing body of Australian Rules Football in Australia. It was founded in then British Colony of Victoria (now Australia) in 1896 largely by British men. So Tom Banks’ role is of enormous interest, being part African. His mother was a local Australian-Britisher woman that his father Jourdan married in Maryborough.
The VFL had in 1896 seceded from the original governing body in Victoria, the Victorian Football Association (VFA). The VFA was founded in 1877 and its first President was an Australian-born British nobleman Sir Michael Clarke.
The only reason I can come up with, and it’s speculation on my part, as to why the AFL has largely ignored Tom Banks is his story paints the US in a negative light over slavery and promotes Britain in a positive light because of its opposition to slavery.
To those who might not be aware, the AFL has erased its British heritage in order to appear “anti colonial” but paradoxically it promotes US nationalism which obviously has its own colonial controversies such as native Americans and of course African slavery.
I have contacted the AFL numerous times over this contradiction but no answers have been forthcoming.
Left: Sarah Jane Banks née McMullen (1848-1940), local white Australian Britisher woman and mother of Tom Banks (1867-1919) (photo on the right).
She married Jourdan Banks (1832-87), an African slave who fled the United States of America in the 1850s and eventually arrived in British Australia during the Gold Rush period. Tom Banks is believed to be the first man of African ancestry to have played a part in founding a major football competition anywhere in the world. The Victorian Football League (later The Australian Football League) was founded in 1896 in British Australia largely by men of British identity. Banks inclusion – and social acceptance – as a founding father is all the more remarkable for that race conscious era. Photos sourced from Ancestry.com