The Origins of Australian Football online exhibition

Launch the origins locker room » Learn about the people, places and events that shaped the early days of football.

Launch the origins chronology » Follow football's early history from its humble beginnings in 1858 to its dominance at the turn of the century.

AFTER travelling with the Australian Football Experience tour, two interactive exhibitions capturing the history of Victorian football in the 1800s are now also available online.

The project brought Swinburne University Faculty of Design students together with the AFL, State Library of Victoria and Melbourne Cricket Club Library in an innovative collaboration.

It began with Swinburne University Associate Professor Angelina Russo and Dr Mark Pennings from the Queensland University of Technology who have been developing a research project focussing on the ways in which audiences use content within libraries and museums to better their understanding of sporting history.

The two online exhibitions, based on research conducted by Dr Pennings focussed on the origins of Australian Football, developed from this research.

Swinburne Faculty of Design students Kelly Griffiths, Matt Hall and Ryan Peel worked with Dr Russo to develop prototype online exhibitions during their semester 1 multimedia coursework. Over the semester break, they developed these prototypes into fully functional online exhibitions under the guidance of the AFL.

The exhibitions then joined the Australian Football Experience as it toured Victoria, allowing the public to interact with the exhibits on massive 50” touch screens within the football history dome – a purpose-built portable structure shaped like an enormous red Sherrin football.

In the next few months, Dr Russo and the AFL will continue to collaborate on the development of a research project which draws State Library of Victoria, State Library of South Australia, Melbourne Cricket Club Library and the AFL together to map the ways in which audiences engage with the exhibition content. Dr Russo has set up a social media site: http://australianfootballsorigins.ning.com where she hopes audiences will continue to share their knowledge and content around the beginnings of the game.

Dr Russo said, “Australian Football touches the lives of over 11 million people in Australia alone. That’s a big audience base to consider when you’re working with cultural content and social media. If we can get even a small proportion of those dedicated football fans to connect with the historic content – and possibly to share their own, then we’ll have a great foundation from which to research cross-sector experiences”.