The AFL Season Record for 2018 is now available. This publication has expanded in size enormously over the years. This years edition comprises 1248 pages. The thickness of the pages is quite thin, almost like a telephone book which makes the publication still quite compact. There is a greatly expanded section covering the AFL Women's competition which is very welcome and apt. The total number of statistical sections has expanded yet again which is hard to believe given the voluminous scope of this work. For stats nerds like me this is a delight and the division of sections is clear and well thought out but it would no doubt overwhelm some. But there are other more concise season guides available in print and online so I am pleased that this statistical bible is still being published for the stats and records tragics like me.
Published by Slattery Media, and widely available in newsagents and bookstores.

Also fairly new and worth a look are:

The Footy Lady: The Trailblazing Story of Suan Alberti by Stephanie Asher. Published by Melbourne University Press.

Fabulous Phil: The Phil Carman Story by Matt Watson. The biography of the truly mercurial and gifted Collingwood star of the 1970s, who played with a string of clubs but whose greatest exploits were with Collingwood. Published by Brolga Publishing.

Cazaly: The Legend,  by Robert Allen. A work many years in the making but worth the wait. A definitive, meticulous and fascinating study of one of the legendary figures in Australian football. Also available from Slattery Media and many bookstores.

Reading Australian Rules Football: The Definitive Guide to the Game has just been published and is now on sale from the Walla Walla Press website. It is the most comprehensive survey of Australian Rules Football material every attempted. The book identifies over 2,000 citations and includes over 1,500 annotated entries written by experts. This is more than double the number of citations in an earlier work, Reading the Game (2005).

Read more about Reading Australian Rules Football from the Walla Walla Press website.

Cover image by Rennie Ellis, 'Anxious Essendon Fans', H2010.108/348, reproduced with permission from Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive. Copyright, Rennie Ellis/SLV.

This review originally written 11 July 2010
Just finished reading All I Can Be by former Collingwood champion Nathan Buckley. As far as footy autobiographies go it is pretty substantial, a bit over 400 pages. I found it a pretty absorbing read most of the time. He documents his whole career as you would expect in a book of this length but there is plenty of reflection and analysis of the craft, discipline, techniques and psychology involved in succeeding in football at the elite level. Buckley clearly indicates you have to be exceptionally tough mentally and physically to survive.

Cynics might suggest it formed part of a job application for his current assistant coach and head coach in waiting position at Collingwood. There could be some truth in that but who could blame a player with serious coaching aspirations for that. Overall I felt it was a pretty honest book.  The relationship between Buckley and his father was a fascinating one to learn about. It doesn’t contain the commonly used lists of greatest players, opponents, my greatest team sections etc. These segments are going out of style in footy biographies which is perhaps a good thing. However he does reveal that Cameron Ling was probably the hardest opponent he faced, Darren Jarman he rated as the best kick – he meant general field kicking,  and Gary Ablett Senior as the best player he had seen.

All I Can Be by Nathan Buckley, with Ben Collins

Rennie Ellis, a renowned photographer of Australian social life and personalities, took many photos of VFL football. Most of these date from the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these photos can be seen online through the State Library of Victoria’s website. There are approx 700 online images in Ellis’s footy pictures overall. See Rennie Ellis football images to view.

Trove is a vast online archive of Australian published and unpublished material. It includes a search-able catalog of books and other items in Australian Libraries.  Trove allows people to create an account which can be used to create lists, or give items descriptive tags. These features are now very common on social networking sites. There are some good footy lists and tags on Trove. A Trove user identified as ‘swade’ has created a useful list of  links to newspaper reports on VFL Grand Finals, and the Brownlow Medal. Check them out at VFL Grand Finals, and VFL Brownlow Medals. Check out AFL and VFL Football Club Histories, as well, this is one of my lists.

This a superb novel which has won this year's Vogel prize. Jason is a young teen living in the inner eastern suburbs of Melbourne. It's 1985 and his greatest joy and meaning in life is football. His Mother is bringing him up on her own. She works incredibly hard as a nurse and Jason has to cope with a lot of time on his own. Jason wants to play football and his Mother, Christine, is not happy about that, but she is persuaded by another parent to let him play, but he must wear a helmet.

Jason is a gifted and committed player and football gives him a status and confidence among his peers. But this doesn't translate into a better relationship with his Mother. By year 11 Jason has dropped out of school and is doing dope and booze and hanging with graffiti gangs. With the help of a few football mentors he manages to keep things together enough to attract interest from the Hawthorn under 19 squad. A difficult adolescence seems to have been survived until a clash with his Mother uncovers shocking events from the past and Jason's world falls apart. To bring things back together Jason must discover more about himself and his family's past.

Written in a simple but evocative style that moves the story along with suspense, intrigue and poignancy, Eleven Seasons is the best footy novel for many years. Hawthorn fans in particular will love the many references to the great Hawks players and moments of the 1980s and early 1990s, including a description of Chris Langford's very muscular but lean action man physique as ''mesmerising".

Working on a new edition for Reading the Game (RTG) again. I have been looking at lots of club histories of rural and suburban footy clubs.  Very often they are a chronological arranged series of summaries of club highlights and milestones, with a brief account of the club's origins. Newspaper reports are the main source usually, and are often reproduced in voluminous quantities. Being amateur publications they usually lack a narrative structure and theme,  but they serve a purpose for their communities, and are very useful as a record of events and personalities which have shaped the clubs.