Professor Rob Hess gave us an interesting historical and sociological review of Chinese footballers in the goldfields of Victoria.
 
Australian Rules Football was codified in 1859 with just ten rules, and in 1915, the first women’s match was played in Perth. In 2017 a routine match was played in China, sponsored by Tourism Australia, to promote the game there.
 
Rob filled in some of the gaps between those dates with details of Chinese footballers, mainly played by miners, laundrymen and gardeners. The game of football assisted the integration of the Chinese into the broader Australian community.
 
He described how in 1892, two Cantonese Chinese teams, the Miners and the Gardeners, assembled in their stockings in front of the Red Lion and were transported in a six-car procession with the townspeople cheering them down the dusty streets.
 
The Miners were captained by Quong Tart, an extraordinary historical character who straddled the east-west cultural divide with class. Today he is immortalised in bronze outside Ashfield Station in Sydney. Quong Tart spoke English with a thick Scottish accent and introduced café society to Australia through his chain of teahouses. Tart was the quintessential multicultural man, comfortable in a Kilt or Chinese robes, a bagpipe player and an honorary Mandarin of the fourth degree. Philanthropist, merchant, freemason, president of the NSW Victorian Football Club, it’s fitting that Quong Tart kicked off the Chinese Australian Rules tradition.
 
Professor Hess related how Chinese footballers raised money for charity in the goldfields and later in Melbourne, and that several Chinese footballers went on to play in the VFL.
 
 
Photos:
The first Melbourne Chinese Australian Rules Football Team in 1899, St Vincent’s Hospital Charity Game. Photograph: Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria
 
 Portrait of Quong Tart (Artist Unknown). Tart was a philanthropist, merchant, freemason and president of the NSW Victorian Football Club in Australia. Photograph: State Library of NSW
 
Les Kew Ming “The Fighting Footballer”. Ming was one of the early Australian Rules players who were Chinese. Photograph: North Melbourne Football Club
 
Adjunct Associate Professor Rob Hess is an historian and a former staff member in the College of Sport and Exercise Science at Victoria University.  He has a long-standing interest in the social history of sport and his PhD was the first ever doctoral study of the history of Australian Rules football.  Rob is a past president of the Australian Society for Sports History and he currently serves as a regional academic editor for the International Journal of the History of Sport.  He is also a member of the Australian Football Heritage Group, an honorary heritage consultant with Netball Victoria and a Board member of the History Council of Victoria.  His most recent book (co-written with Brunette Lenkić) is "Play On! The Hidden History of Women’s Australian Rules Football," published in 2016.