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Four Corners: 'Carn a Saints': Aussie Rules and popular culture

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Old photo footballers play in Australian Rules football game
Four Corners: 'Carn a Saints': Aussie Rules and popular culture

SUBJECTS:  History

YEARS:  9–10


How important is sport to Australians and how big a part of Australian popular culture is sport?

This Four Corners program looks at the 1965 Victorian Football League (VFL) Grand Final between the St Kilda Saints and the Essendon Bombers.

Discover the passion and excitement of the event and how much it meant to Australia Rules football fans.


Things to think about

  1. 1.Is sport important to you? Sport has long been considered a part of national identity in many cultures, but there is possibly no nation where its importance is greater than it is in Australia. While Australia has competitions in four football codes, Australian Rules football has long been the most popular code in Victoria.
  2. 2.Why were crowds outside the football ground six hours before the VFL Grand Final? What was the special significance of this game for St Kilda fans? How many spectators attended the game and how many others wanted to get in? Describe the scene as the game begins. How did the Saints' fans react to their team's loss?
  3. 3.Make a list of any other kinds of events that you think could attract crowds of over 100,000 people in Australia. What conclusions can you draw from your list about: a) popular culture in Australia; b) the significance of sport as part of Australian culture; c) the significance of Australian Rules football in Victoria and in other states where the code is popular?
  4. 4.Use the internet and other sources to conduct research on the popularity of one other sport in Australia in the period from 1945 to 1965. Find out whether that sport was popular throughout Australia, whether it was played at the international level (unlike Australian Rules), and the size of the crowds that attended its finals.



Date of broadcast: 1965


Copyright

Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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