Found a couple of websites linking AFL to Rugby including the following cut and paste
http://www.iafc.org.au/origins.html
EARLY HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL
The most commonly held misconception about Australian football is that its origins are in Gaelic football. This notion has been refuted by prominent historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey in his history of Australian football, "A Game of our Own".
In fact, Australian football started as a variation on the various football games as played in the English Public (private) schools during the 1850s.
The person who did the most to establish Australian football was Tom W. Wills. Melbourne born, he was sent to England at age 14 where he attended Rugby School in the Midlands. He was not a brilliant scholar, but excelled at games. He became captain of football (obviously Rugby style) and was a champion cricketer, scored 51 runs in a match against an All England Eleven, took nine wickets for Kent against Gentlemen of Sussex and a "five fa" at Lords against the M.C.C.
He returned to Melbourne in 1856 and became well known for his cricketing talents. He soon looked for a winter activity and this led him to write to the new sporting weekly, Bells Life in Victoria on 10 July 1958. Part of the letter reads "Now that cricket has been put aside for some months to come, .....why can they (cricketers) not, I say, form a foot-ball club, and form a committee of three or more to draw up a code of laws?"
A few games of football were played in 1858 but it was not until 17 May 1859 that Tom Wills chaired the meeting of seven men who framed the first rules of Australian football. Four of the seven had experience of football at Britain's schools and Universities. They were divided on what the rules should be, and consulted copies of the rules of the English schools - Rugby, Eton, Winchester and Harrow.
They framed a set of ten rules from their knowledge of the English games, and their experience of the previous season. They wanted a game that was simpler than the complicated Rugby game, and a game that had less of the "vigour and roughness" of Rugby and the other school games.
Three of the ten original Australian rules of 1859 that were taken from Rugby are remarkably still features of the modern version of the two codes, and clearly indicate the origin of Australian football.
V. In case the ball is kicked behind Goal, any one of the side behind whose Goal it is kicked may bring it 20 yards in front of any portion of the space between the "Kick Off" posts, and shall kick it as nearly as possible in a line with the opposite Goal.
This early kick off after a behind in Australian football has the equivalent in Rugby, the 22 drop out.
VI. Any player catching the Ball directly from the foot may call "mark". He then has a free kick; no player from the opposite side being allowed to come inside the spot marked.
The mark is still a part of Rugby, and has become the most spectacular feature of Australian football.
IX. When a ball goes out of bounds (the same being indicated by a row of posts) it shall be bought back to the point where it crossed the boundary line, and thrown in at right angles with that line.
This feature developed into the boundary throw in Australian football and the broadly similar line-out in Rugby, which still retains the row of posts!
In a chapter entitled "The Gaelic Myth" Professor Geoffrey Blainey dispels the notion that Australian football is a direct descendant of Gaelic football. In contrast to the voluminous evidence of the connections between early English football codes and Australian football "not even one piece of positive evidence for a Gaelic origin of football has so far been found and I can see strong circumstantial evidence against such a notion." Only one Irishman was in the original committee of seven, and he attended the Rugby stronghold of Trinity College, Dublin.
None of the early football clubs wore the green of Ireland, Protestant schools rather than Catholic ones were prominent in the early decades of football, the Irishmen in strongly Irish towns in Victoria shunned football in favour of Hurly, and it seems that no one in 19th century Victoria expressed the opinion that the Australian game of football had derived from the Gaelic game.
The early players and developers of football could have learnt little from the rules of Gaelic football because there were no written rules until 1885. By that stage Gaelic football was in danger of extinction. The ravages of the 1840's famine and the massive outflow of people to the United States had weakened the old sporting customs in rural Ireland.
In 1884 Michael Cusack founded the Gaelic Athletic Association in Dublin to prevent the traditional Gaelic sports from dying out. The first rules for Gaelic football were written in February 1885 and like Australian football the rules were much modified in the following years. In 1886 tackling was banned from the Gaelic game, and it did not contain the features common to Australia and English codes such as marks, punted free kicks, kickoffs and goals from kicks only.
"The chief similarity between the games, the lack of an offside law arose independently, and not through imitation."
"Today's similarities tell us little about the complicated history of each game. Just as two games can grow apart over time, so they can become more alike over time. At one period, Australian football and Gaelic football grew apart; in another period they converged in spirit more than in rules. Australian football in the first years had virtually no likeness to Gaelic football as played today. It is the modern versions of Gaelic and Australian football which gives rise to the dubious belief that the two codes are first cousins or even father and son".
"The history of American football offers a similar lesson. It warns us of the hazard of assuming that a code of football alters so little in the course of a century that we can deduce its parentage and manner of birth simply by examining its present rules. Today no two codes of football are further apart than Australian and American football, and yet both were the offspring more of Rugby than of any other code".
Australian football was from the earliest years a spectator sport. In 1880 when the FA Cup Final in England drew 6,000 spectators, an important match in Melbourne would draw 15,000. In 1886 the two champion teams of the decade South Melbourne and Geelong attracted 36,000 to a ground near Albert Park. The crowds flocked to the games because they wanted to see "the long run with the ball, the high mark, the clever dodging and the sudden physical clash", so the law makers opened the game up, protected the player going for a mark, and allowed the umpire to quickly disperse scrimmages.
The rules have continued to be modified and the game we now know evolved slowly, rather than being created at one meeting.
Does any one else have any other therories on the origin of our footy??
Bill
Phil
Rob de Santos
