Join us in person or online for a seminar with Dr Mathew Turner and Associate Professor Tony Joel.
Anzac Day Football and the Invention of Tradition, 1960–2025
Can a game of football become a “tradition” after a single match? It is a difficult claim to take seriously, yet this is precisely what has occurred with the Anzac Day fixture between Collingwood and Essendon. Since 1995, that match has been treated as the origin of Anzac Day football, acquiring the status of a singular and enduring “tradition”. Drawing on AFL and RSL archival material, this paper challenges that account by reconstructing a longer history dating back to 1960, when Anzac Day fixtures were rotated across clubs and lacked any singular status. It also reconsiders the VFL’s role, emphasising its initial reluctance and the pressure exerted by the RSL and Victorian Government in shaping its involvement. Here, the concept of an “invented tradition”, as formulated by Hobsbawm and Ranger, appears apt. It captures 1995 not as an origin, but as the point at which a more complex and shared practice was narrowed into a singular “tradition”. In the process, earlier decades are marginalised in both public memory and historical accounts, and one fixture is elevated at the expense of a longer, shared history of Anzac Day football. This argument is grounded in research that began in the AFL archive nearly a decade ago, originally emerging as an offshoot of work on the 1910 bribery scandal before developing into a separate research project and, ultimately, an article that was published in the International Journal of the History of Sport in early 2026. It also reflects one of the authors’ earliest forays into sports history, and the paper also traces something of the research journey.
22 April 2026, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here.
Tony Joel is Associate Professor of History at Deakin University. He is a founding member of Deakin’s Centre for Contemporary Histories. A former German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) research scholar, Tony’s two main research interests are sports history and the politics of war memory and commemoration. Tony’s main teaching responsibilities involve the Holocaust, sport in history, and since 2021 a groundbreaking unit dedicated to the history of Australian football. Tony has won multiple awards for his teaching including at the national level as a recipient of an Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the federal government’s Australian Awards for University Teaching. His book entitled Line & Length: A History of the Geelong Cricket Club, co-authored with Mathew Turner, won the Australian Society for Sports History (ASSH) 2025 Book Award.
Dr Mathew Turner received his doctorate in History from Deakin University in 2016. He is a former German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) research scholar, and postdoctoral fellow at the Zentrum für Holocaust-Studien in Munich. Mathew’s diverse research interests range from Nazi Germany and the Holocaust through to Australian sports history. Since 2012, Mathew has taught various undergraduate history subjects and he has presented his research at international conferences in Australia, Europe, and the United States. Mathew has published articles in high-ranking academic journals and previous books include Historians at The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: Their Role as Expert Witnesses (I.B. Tauris, 2018) and, co-authored with Tony Joel, On The Take: The 1910 Scandal that Changed Football Forever (Slattery Media Group, 2020) and Line & Length: A History of the Geelong Cricket Club (2024).
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