Anti-Football League

The Anti-Football League is an Australian organisation that pokes fun at the obsession with Australian Rules Football. It was founded by Melbourne journalist Keith Dunstan in 1967. The chief qualification for membership is not an active dislike but a disinterest in football, a desire to spend one’s time and conversation on other things.

Origins

The "AFL"The other AFL (viz., the Australian Football League) was not created until 1990 (42 years later), when the then Victorian Football League decided to changed its name to the Australian Football League. was created in response to a remark made by journalist Douglas Wilkie in the offices of The Sun News-Pictorial on Sunday 16 April 1967.

On that day, the building was filled with sports writers and ex-footballers – along with their ghost writers – preparing the Monday edition of the football round-up for the weekend. Amongst the relentless discussions pertaining to football, Wilkie, the Sun’s foreign correspondent made a remark to Dunstan that he had had enough. “There must be a better life than this. Couldn’t we start an anti football organisation?”Keith Dunstan, No Brains At All: An Autobiography, 1990, page 193 Dunstan’s reply was found the next day in his column, “A Place in the Sun”. In two days Dunstan had received 104 letters from members of the public eager to join.

Dunstan suggested that a badge should be devised, so that League members could...
Read More