Letter From Australia: Australia is known as a sporting paradise, which, it must be said, it is, but that doesn't mean all sports are played in all corners of the country.
Ten years ago, in 1997, I left my home city of Melbourne to spend a year in Ireland. I had six months in Cork, where I was a sub-editor at Da Paper, and six months in Dublin, where I was a sub-editor at The Irish Times.
Sport, like architecture or literature, or public transport or take-away food, offers a means to gauge the workings of a country, but I found sport to be an especially fascinating marker in Ireland. I was intrigued by sport's regionalism. Soccer was a city game, while the GAA was a bastion for culchies. Within the GAA, northern Offaly was football country and southern Offaly was for hurling.
There was also the marker of class. If you played rugby union, you'd been to a private school. The exception (as in so many cases) was Limerick, which, it was explained, had become a home for rugby union at all levels of society because it was a garrison town.
I'm sure a large part of my fascination was that such quirks reflected the partisan nature of sport in my country. Australia is known as a sporting paradise, which, it must be said, it is, but that doesn't mean all sports are played in all corners of the country.
Rugby union and rugby league are the dominant football codes in the two states that extend along the east coast, New South Wales and Queensland, which, between them, are home to almost half the country's population. Australian national rugby league and rugby union teams historically have been a selection of players from these states.
In recent years, with the inclusion of the Australian Capital Territory and, later, Western Australia in the Super 14 rugby union competition, it might have looked as if rugby union had become a more national game, but those new teams are composed almost entirely of players from New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital, and Queensland. In due course, Canberra, the city that effectively equates to the Capital Territory, and Western Australia might produce players for the Wallabies, but for now the presence of the ACT Brumbies and the Western Force in the world's leading provincial rugby competition is a marketing exercise.
Australian football is the dominant football code in the southern and western states - that is, Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. The Northern Territory is an oddity in that it has a history of hosting rugby league and Australian football in equal measure, but the extraordinary proportion of Northern Territory players, most of them Aboriginal, at Australian Football League clubs means that the indigenous code deserves to be considered the stronger football code in "the Territory", as it's known.
In 1978, a Melbourne historian devised a border that separated Australia into two zones; south of the border was the Australian football zone, while north of the border was the land of the rugby codes.
Many reasons have been given for the country's split into distinct football halves but, in essence, it's a product of the fact Australian football was devised in Melbourne and, as a consequence of the rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney, the nation's two biggest cities, Sydney wanted nothing to do with the game.
The states that fell under the influence of Sydney in the 19th century, which were New South Wales and Queensland, adopted the rugby codes, while the states under the influence of Melbourne, the country's historic financial capital, took Australian football to their hearts.
In 1982, a Sydney club was established in the nation's leading Australian football competition as the opening plank in the campaign to increase the indigenous game's appeal in the heathen states. In 1987, a club was established in Brisbane, the Queensland capital. The success of that club, and the migration of Victorians and Tasmanians attracted to Queensland's sunny climate, means Queensland has overturned history and become an unlikely stronghold of Australian football.
This is not to say rugby league and rugby union are any less strong in Queensland. It's just that, in such a dynamic age, historic sporting boundaries have been broken down and complexities have arisen. Television, which has taken all codes to all corners of the country, has been a big influence in this catholic phase in Australia's sporting history.
Last year a new threat emerged in the battle for football hearts and minds. Officials from Australian football and the rugby codes have long feared the threat of soccer, the game that is more national than any other, and the football code that most appeals to mothers, but it was only at soccer's 2006 World Cup that their fears were confirmed.
In a manner that reflected the hysteria over the Irish teams under Jack Charlton, Australian sports fans who had previously pilloried the round-ball code became transfixed by the Socceroos' dramatic progress in the World Cup under manager Guus Hiddink. The Australians played so well, with a belief that many rivals thought obscene given the inglorious history of soccer in this country, that they only just failed to take Italy, the eventual winners, to a penalty shoot-out in the round of 16.
Australia's soccer prospects have since been enhanced by the Socceroos' inclusion in the Asian Cup competition, where, for the first time, they will have strong and regular competition from international rivals. But that is a subject for another column.
Paul Daffey is a journalist withThe Age.
