Brisbane Australian Football Club
| Brisbane | |
|---|---|
| Names | |
| Full name | Brisbane Australian Football Club |
| Club details | |
| Founded | 1866 |
| Dissolved | c. 1886 |
| Ground(s) | Brisbane, Queensland, Australia |
The Brisbane Football Club is a defunct Australian rules football club. Formed in May 1866, it was the first known football club of any code in Brisbane, Queensland.
The club commenced playing according to what was then known as the 'Melbourne rules' (which would later become known as 'Victorian rules' and then Australian rules football). However, in 1876 the club adopted rugby rules, to fit in with two newly formed football clubs, before reverting to Australian rules football (with occasional rugby matches) in 1879.
The club was to last around only 20 years, disappearing from the public record in the late 1880s, when rugby football was in the ascendancy in Brisbane and Australian rules football was in decline.
Football has been played in Brisbane from very early times, as evidenced by this notice in The Moreton Bay Courier in 1849 (a mere 25 years after the arrival of the first white settlers in the Brisbane region, at which time the population was around 2000 people, many of whom were former convicts and poor Irish immigrants):
Given the inchoate nature of the various types of football at that time, they may have been playing simple mob football. Alternatively, they could have been playing in accordance with the recently published Rugby school rules (1845) or the Cambridge Rules (1848), the latter being the forerunner of association football rules. The game that was to become Australian rules football was not to be codified for another 10 years.
The Brisbane Football Club was formed at a meeting on 22 May 1866: the Brisbane Courier reported that "A meeting of gentlemen favorable to the formation of a Football Club in Brisbane was held on Tuesday, at Braysher's Metropolitan Hotel [formerly in Edward Street near Mary Street] ... a committee was appointed to prepare a code of rules ... The prospects of the club must be certainly very encouraging to the promoters, as already more than twenty gentlemen have joined, and a large number of others have signified their wish to do so."
...
Wikipedia