I put up a films and docos list the other day and kept going once I’d finished it, so here’s the reading version in case anyone’s after something for the off season. Split it by league this time, because the good stuff is spread all over the country and the West and South Australian books tend to get buried under the Melbourne ones.
The national game
The Coach by John Powers. In late 1976 Powers asked Barassi if he could sit in the room at North Melbourne for a whole season. Barassi said yes, which nobody would say now. What came out was 1977, the drawn Grand Final, the replay, the lot. Still the best book of its type in the country and it’s nearly fifty years old.
The Red Fox by Ben Collins, on Norm Smith. Collins tracked down more than a hundred people who played with him or under him. Proper research, not a clip job.
Australia’s Game by Nicholson, Stewart, de Moore and Hess. Seven hundred pages on where the whole thing came from and why it looks like nothing else on earth. Not a bedside book. It’s the one you go to when an argument needs settling.
A Wink from the Universe by Martin Flanagan on the Dogs in 2016. He got Beveridge’s match diaries and notes and spoke to every player in the premiership side. Flanagan writes about footy like it’s about something else, which it usually is.
Night Games by Anna Krien. A sexual assault trial involving a footballer, and everything that sat around it. Won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. It is not an easy read and it isn’t meant to be.
The Boys’ Club by Michael Warner on how the AFL actually runs itself. Depending on your view of head office you’ll either nod along or throw it.
Out west
Polly Farmer by Steve Hawke. Sister Kate’s, Greenbushes, East Perth, West Perth, Geelong, and a bloke who changed how the game is played by inventing the handball as an attacking weapon. First published 1994, revised since. If you only read one WA footy book this is it.
Brotherboys by Sean Gorman, on Jim and Phillip Krakouer. Mt Barker to Claremont to North Melbourne, and honest about what they copped the whole way. Later turned into a stage play that toured nationally.
Behind the Play by Anthony J Barker, edited by Alan East. A history of WA football from 1868, and more interested in the politics and the social side than in listing premierships. The serious WAFL history.
The Sandover Medal Men by Alan East. Every medallist from 1921, 470 pages of them. Hard to find now, worth grabbing if you see one.
Centimetre Perfect by Dennis Cometti. Geraldton kid, West Perth player, then the voice. More fun than it has any right to be.
Anyone chasing older WA stuff, there’s a big list of WAFL titles over at WAFL Collectables, going back to a 1929 souvenir.
South Australia
Barrie Robran MBE: Legend by Bruce Pointon. Seven years of work and about a hundred interviews, on the best footballer South Australia produced and one of the great what-ifs of the game. Self published, which tells you something about how these books get made.
Black Crow by Geoff Kingston, the Andrew McLeod story. Darwin, then Port Adelaide, then two Norm Smith Medals.
Deadly, Unna? by Phillip Gwynne. Yes it’s fiction and yes it’s on the school list, but it’s the best thing written about footy in a small SA town, and it became the film Australian Rules from the other post.
The women’s game
Play On! by Brunette Lenkic and Rob Hess. Turns out competitive women’s footy in this country started with shop assistants at the Perth department stores, which I did not know. Goes right through the war years and the state leagues that kept it alive.
Roar by Samantha Lane on the first AFLW season. Daisy Pearce, Bec Goddard, Tayla Harris. Won a Quill in 2019.
The VFA, the bush and the suburbs
Fabulous Fred by Paul Amy on Fred Cook. Footscray, then Port Melbourne, where he kicked goals by the truckload and got about as famous as a VFA footballer could get. Then it comes apart badly.
Local Rites by Paul Daffey. A winter spent driving around Victorian bush leagues in 2001. Every club you’ve ever played against is in here somewhere.
Loose Men Everywhere by John Harms. Being a Geelong supporter through the long years before it got good. Funny in the way that only comes from suffering.
And if you’ve got kids, Specky Magee by Felice Arena and Garry Lyon is still the one that gets them reading.
Same as last time, tell me what I’ve left off. Especially the WAFL and SANFL club histories, because there are dozens of those and most of them never made it near a bookshop.