Origins of the game - History of the local clubs - The modern league - Aboriginal footballers - Famous aboriginal people - Michael Long - Che Cockatoo Collins - Gavin Wanganeen; Arranged chronologically. Impact of the Great War on football - Sport - John Wren.

‘A young, naive kid, with a brand-new football. Over time, the leather aged from the bumps along the trail. The Footscray winters and some glorious liniment-scented afternoons. All of the laughs, the scraps, the yarns and characters. The game. It all left a mark on me, on my soul.’ Bob Murphy has never been a typical footballer. Music buff, Age columnist and Winnebago driver, he is as comfortable in a quiet corner of a Fitzroy café or the front bar of a grungy pub as he is in the locker room. Murphy takes the reader inside his 17-year career, including his three years as captain of the Bulldogs, exploring the people, places and events that shaped him: from playing backyard cricket in 1980s Warragul to Community Cup with Paul Kelly in the 2000s, and from the joy of marrying his high-school crush to the agony of a season-ending ACL ruptures. How did the country kid with a gypsy’s heart become an All-Australian captain? What’s it like to have your club win the grand final for the first time in 62 years and have to cheer from the sidelines? How does it feel to realise you can no longer do the things that made you great? The celebrated Australian football bard Martin Flanagan has long insisted Bob Murphy has a book in him like no footballer has written. Leather Soul proves him right.

A pictorial and written history of football (soccer) at Wynnum in Brisbane, Queensland, in celebration of the club's centenary in 2021.

"...excellent coverage...essential to worldwide bibliographic coverage."--AMERICAN REFERENCE BOOKS ANNUAL. This comprehensive reference provides current finding & ordering information on more than 75,000 in-print books published in or about Australia, or written by Australian authors, organized by title, author, & keyword. You'll also find brief profiles of more than 7,000 publishers & distributors whose titles are represented, as well as information on trade associations, local agents of overseas publishers, literary awards, & more. From D.W. Thorpe.

Papers by Robin Grow, Bob Stewart and Dave Nadel annotated separately.

Norm Smith is arguably the greatest Australian Football coach in history. Smith - who, in 1996, was selected as the coach of the Australian Football League's Team of the Century - led the Melbourne Demons to a staggering six premierships from 1955 to 1964. When it came to football, he was a hard man, brutally honest to his players and an utterly ruthless and fearsome disciplinarian, but this was offset by a gentler, charitable side of his nature which was rarely seen in public. This is his story, and secondarily that of his older brother and fellow coach Len Smith, from their childhood in tough, working-class Northcote during the Depression; Norm as a childhood supporter of Collingwood, the club he would conquer many times over as a man; through his distinguished playing career at Melbourne where he built a reputation as the most unselfish player in the game; his first coaching job at Fitzroy; his triumphant reign at Melbourne, detailing his relationship with his ‘foster son' Ron Barassi, his friendly coaching rivalry with his brother, and his controversial sacking and reinstatement in 1965; to his last coaching job at South Melbourne, which in 1970 he lifted to its first finals series in 25 years, and culminating in his premature death at the age of 57

Martin Flanagan, journalist at the Age, has often written of the great Wonders of Australian Sport, his love of the AFL, of the importance of Aboriginal players in the highest echelons of Australian sport. A few years ago he threw himself at the mysterious and distressed figure of Tom Wills - our early Colonial cricket celebrity, who put together the Aboriginal Cricket Team set for Great Britain in 1868 - and helped write the original Code for Australian Rules. A hero for several original clubs - Melbourne, Collingwood and Richmond for example. Yet things fall apart, as things have often done for our sporting stars... So Flanagan went deeper: "I dared myself to actually picture Tom Wills in the various situations I knew him to have been in during his life and backed my fancy. It was like entering a creative delirium. Pictures appeared before me which I wrote down in scenes. If I do the same thing in ten years' time, I may come up with a different story but I doubt that will happen. I doubt the energy that accompanied the writing of this treatment will ever return." And so we have his TOM WILLS PICTURE SHOW, shedding light on a most complex character...