behaviour off thefield’(Ward 2009, p. 593). Nevertheless, this was a different
order of magnitude from the situation in England, where amateurs were
identified by their title (Lord, Sir, Mr, etc.) and professionals by their surname
and initials, and an annual Gentlemen vs Players game between amateurs (the
Gentlemen) and professionals (the Players) was played from 1819 until 1962,
when the concept of amateurism was abolished.^4 In Australia, cricket was
more obviously the people’s sport, with placement in the national team
usually on merit.^5
The organization of major team sports changed little for most of the twen-
tieth century, but the audience increased due to radio and TV. In the USA,
after the broadcast of the 1921 Dempsey–Carpentier world heavyweight box-
ing championship and the spread of TV after 1945, radio and then TV became
major revenue sources for sports leagues. In Australia, radio and TV helped to
broaden audiences beyond the live spectators, but the commercial impact was
delayed due to the dominant role of the public broadcaster. The most import-
ant competitive and structural changes occurred during the last quarter of the
twentieth century, largely driven by increased TV revenues. Following media
baron Kerry Packer’s successful challenge of the traditional cricket organiza-
tion by establishing‘World Series Cricket’in the 1977/78 Australian cricket
season (Haigh 1993), Packer’s monopoly of rugby league broadcasting rights
was challenged by his rival, Rupert Murdoch, who, in the mid-1990s, estab-
lished a Super League of disaffected and new clubs. Both of these challenges
led to increased TV revenues for the sports concerned and higher wages for
players.
In the 1980s and 1990s, spurred by reduced transport costs and national TV
coverage, Australian Rules and rugby league both attempted to go national
and hence came into head-to-head code competition. None of these changes
led to a large expansion in the number of clubs, as the league structures were
kept essentially unchanged except for the introduction of individual clubs
(either by relocation or by expansion, as in the USA) in states not previously
served by the code.
(^4) The distinction between amateurs and professionals was less powerful in immigrant countries
than in Europe. In the USA, the Knickerbocker Club’sinfluence rapidly declined after the
formation of thefirst professional baseball league in 1876, and Australian Rules football,
although devised by graduates of English and Irish private schools and colleges, never
distinguished between paid or unpaid players. Australia abided by the amateur requirement that
persisted until the second half of the twentieth century in global events such as the Olympic
Games and Grand Slam tennis tournaments. 5
The major exception was exclusion of Aboriginals, despite the fact that, in 1868, thefirst
Australian team to tour Britain had been an Aboriginal team. In 1869 Victoria’sAct to Provide for the
Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Nativesmade it a legal offence to remove any Aborigine
from the colony of Victoria without the approval of the government minister, effectively curtailing
their involvement in the game beyond the local level. This element of Australia’s broader
paternalistic and restrictive policy towards Aboriginals is ignored here.
Australia’s Economic Mores