FOREWORD
AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL – A RICH SOURCE
The game was still being born when artists recognised
it as a goldmine of images.
By Gerard Vaughan.

Images that celebrate the spirit of football, specifically Australian Football, have featured in Australian art since the late nineteenth century. In 1889, Arthur Streeton, one of the most important artists of the Heidelberg School, produced a small painting, The National Game, at a time when the rules and organisation of the game were still in formation. Interestingly, this was almost a decade before the Victorian Football League was introduced. By its very title, Streeton’s painting hints at the search for a sense of nationhood and of national identity, which led, in due course, to Federation.
Perhaps because Australian Football is unique to this country, the subjects of the game and the players have been source material for generations of artists, including some of the most important figures in the history of Australian art: Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams and John Brack to name just a few. The National Gallery of Victoria is, of course, the proud custodian of Nolan’s iconic painting, Footballer (1946), produced while he was completing his first series of paintings on the theme of Ned Kelly. Since we acquired this work in 2002, it has become one of the gallery’s most popular pictures. In his notes of the time, Nolan reveals that he “finished my painting of a footballer this morning and called Jim (the gardener at Heide, the property of John and Sunday Reed, where Nolan produced the Kelly series) to have a look at it. He said it looked quite real, almost as if you were there, so it at least passed the critical eye of a specialist.”
Footballer was exhibited sometimes with the incorrect title Full back, St Kilda, leading to speculation on the identity of the player. But Nolan’s deliberate use of general titles and colours that are not specific to any team reinforce the universal appeal of the vitality of the sportsman and the special significance that sport plays in shaping a sense of cultural and national identity.
The National Gallery of Victoria is delighted to have had the opportunity to enter into partnership with Geoff Slattery Publishing to realise the exhibition, The Spirit of Football. I thank Geoff, Rebecca Costello, Janelle Ward and other members of his team for their collaboration with the NGV on this project. Twenty-one of Australia’s most accomplished and inspiring artists have responded to the central role that Australian Football plays in the daily lives, ambitions and dreams, conversations and arguments of so many people in our community – and they have done so in many different and intriguing ways. I congratulate the artists and their commitment to this exhibition and for their contributions to this publication.

Gerard Vaughan, Director, National Gallery of Victoria

RON BARASSI

Ron Barassi oozes spirituality – not just the spirit of football, but also the spirit of life. It may not always have been so. He is probably the last of the ‘belt ’em with words’ coaches. During his time as captain-coach of Carlton, later coach, and then coach of North Melbourne, Melbourne and Sydney, his reputation was formed off a mix of strategic genius and sharp abuse – particularly abuse of his most gifted players. You can’t imagine this Barassi, when you know the other Barassi – a kind, caring, giving, humble, funny, passionate, innovative and ever-thoughtful gentleman.
Barassi played his first AFL game for Melbourne in 1953, an immature 17-year-old, and has maintained a solid grip on all to do with football in every one of the years since. He has been a champion player, a successful, at times dominant, coach, commentator, board member, muse and visionary. He is the only person in the history of the game to be a life member at four clubs, for services given to each. He is an official Legend of the Australian Football Hall of Fame, and the older he gets, the more he thinks of the potential of the game.
He is never content with ‘now’, but always wonders about ‘what will be, what can be’. He relies on nobody and lives by his constantly repeated dictum: ‘if it is to be, it is up to me’. At the same time, he is always up for helping others, sometimes in obscure and private ways. When John Cahill, a South Australian, was appointed coach of Collingwood in 1983, Barassi organised leaders of Melbourne’s football media to come to his St Kilda home, to meet and greet the new and, no doubt, nervous coach. It was a supremely touching moment in the murderous world of Victorian football.
Barassi shares something with another in football’s spiritual hall of fame, Kevin Sheedy, and that is a delight in the obtuse. Barassi signs his autograph with apparently unconnected numbers: 17 4 10. Translated: Barassi participated in 17 Grand Finals, won 10! The numbers also happen to add up to his famous guernsey number, 31. Eerily, so too, do the digits that make up his mobile phone number.

– Geoff Slattery

Women's business

This is the story of a father and a daughter. I’m the father, a follower of footy – and the Hawks – on and off, for more than 50 years. In the middle of the passion came a long, journalistic stream of objective analysis of all clubs, and the competition, of players in all guernseys, or any guernsey. In all that, with family matters, and life matters, and business, it was easy to drift away from the game, to watch it from afar, to be dispassionate.
Along comes my daughter, Kate. Suddenly, she’s a teenager and wants to go to the footy, to see the Hawks. In sun and in hail. Whatever, wherever. Where did this passion come from? Not from me, an almost lapsed follower at that time. Not from her mother, never a follower. But from her grandmother, on the verge of 90 at the time, and completely illogical about any issue that did not show Hawthorn in a gorgeous, heavenly light.
I once wrote, for The Age, that Carlton deserved to beat the Hawks (in the 1982 preliminary final) and make the premiership challenge, because it was the better team on the day and had been through the year. The old lady didn’t speak to me for a week, and then in clipped tones.
So the passion comes from the previous generation, and how well imbedded it is in the next. I can see in Kate, mum’s same lack of logic, same disrespect for stars in other colours, same dreamy love of the brown-and-gold.
So Kate took me back to footy, and we loved the moment, and the building relationship, and the fact we could watch as equals, and share
a great experience, equally, with the same love and passion. She did it to me, as my mum had done all those years before.
I can see Kate at the footy forever. On those days when I’m there alone, I see her in all the women around me, no doubt drawn to the game as she was. I hope, when Kate’s old, and taking her grandchildren, that she will remember the days she used to go with her old man, and remember too, the influence of her grandmother. She will. By then, mum and I will be long dead, but the stream of support for the Hawks will be running just as strongly as it is today.

– Geoff Slattery

EX DE MEDICI

Tarred and Feathered (Golden Age/Gold Age), 2004
eX de Medici
Watercolour and metallic pigment on paper
156.5 x 115cm

Courtesy of the artist and Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydneyex de Medici was born in country New South Wales and raised in Canberra. Art school was an agitated affair over a period of years interspersed with long bouts of domestic and international travel. de Medici served as collective and board member in one of Australia’s first artist-run collectives, Bitumen River Gallery, in Canberra, and later was foundation and board member of the Canberra Contemporary Art Space. She founded Galerie Constantinople with Neil Roberts in Queanbeyan, NSW, and studied tattooing in Los Angeles in 1989 with assistance from the Australia Council. Selected exhibitions include Scenes From the Ivory Tower, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Site Specific City inaugural exhibition, Canberra Contemporary Art Space; Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (1990 and 1996), Art Gallery of South Australia; Art in the Age of AIDS, National Gallery of Australia; 60 Heads, national touring exhibition; Soft Steel, Heide Museum of Modern Art Melbourne; Mirror With A Memory and So You Wanna Be A Rock Star, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; eX de Medici @ MPRG, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria.
“The work has a central core that discusses the temporary, the low end, all which is both delicate and decaying, corrupting and corrupted. Favourite aphorism is ‘What I think and say today won’t necessarily be what I’ll think and say tomorrow’.”

PEGGY NAPANGARDI JONES

Geelong Nothing! No Wumpurani (young black fellas) Play For Cats, 2004
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas (15 panels)
30 x 30 x 3.5cm (each panel)

Peggy Napangardi Jones was born in 1951 at Phillip Creek Station. The Barkly Tablelands in the Northern Territory is her country. Her mother was a Warlpiri woman, her grandmother was from Alekarenge and her Warumungu father gave Napangardi Jones her inherited dreamtime stories and their laws. They are her inspiration to paint. The artist has fond memories of travelling through the harsh rocky lands with her family. Napangardi Jones grew up in the bush – “When I was a kid, I was living in the bush; no school” – and was introduced to acrylic painting on canvas in 1996 after joining a Julalikari women’s arts and crafts program in Tennant Creek. These enthusiastic women were also encouraged and instructed on how to use other mediums and techniques, including lino-cut, etching, silk screen printing and pottery. Napangardi Jones adapted to all mediums.“In April 2004, Peggy Napangardi Jones had to leave her close-knit Tennant Creek community for dialysis treatment in Alice Springs,” says Beverly Knight. “Fortuitously, a new art centre, Ngurratjuta Iltja Ntjana (Many Hands Art Centre), had opened there and with the support of her community and Julalikari Arts, Tennant Creek, Peggy began to attend the centre twice a week, in between treatment.
I had talked to her community advisor at Julalikari Arts about the prospect of Peggy completing a work for The Spirit of Football and they thought it might just provide the tonic she needed to cope with her new life.
In June 2004, I went to Alice Springs and after much discussion, Peggy wanted to paint one work for each team in the AFL. I had taken with me the new publication by the AFL highlighting their indigenous achievements, which also included all the 2004 AFL indigenous players.
Napangardi Jones knew every player, every club, who they played for, who they used to play for and their career highlights. For a week, we talked footy and especially how many young ‘black fellas’ or Wumpurani were now playing in the AFL. At all clubs except Geelong… There was NO way Peggy was including Geelong, but she did say that in 2005 or 2006, she could do one for nothing if they ‘gave a go’ to a Wumpurani.”
• Words: Beverly Knight, Alcaston Gallery, with Peggy Napangardi Jones, 2004.