Narratives in Dialogue: Remembering,Experiencing, and Appropriating Changes in the Culture of Australian Rules Football

Abstract

In 1990, the Victorian Football League (VFL) became the Australian Football League (AFL) in a symbolic gesture to mark its continuing, although fragmented, national expansion. This commercially strategic move solidified the League’s enduring transition from a parochial competition of Melbourne and its suburbia to a clinically managed franchise business with a nationwide reach and an under-surface global ambition. In this paper, the continual yet not strictly linear development of the League is positioned as an interaction and, at times, a tension between locality and globality, from which to reflect on the stories of Billy and Steph – two AFL followers separated by a generation and differing life experiences. The paper chronologizes neither the VFL/AFL transition nor the two narratives but instead juxtaposes memories and present-day football encounters of the two fans, illuminating creative personal engagements with the League’s perpetually in-flux structures and offering insights into intimate meanings and utilities of community, belonging, and commodity within the AFL spectatorship culture.