THE LATE Dame Olivia Newton-John’s lifelong connection with the Carlton Football Club is thought to have been largely territorial. As with Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, whose club links were forged through his years as a law student at the University of Melbourne in nearby Parkville, Olivia’s interests in the old dark Navy Blues are believed to have stemmed from her time across the road at University High School.

As she told The Footy Show compere Eddie McGuire on the eve of the last match in which Carlton played at Princes Park for AFL premiership points in May 2005: “I’ve barracked for the Blues since I was a kid”.

“I don’t think I ever went to the games when I was young because no-one in my family ever followed the footy . . . I just used to follow them,” Dame Olivia said.

That said, there was another Carlton connection for the Cambridge-born Dame Olivia, as the former President of the Carltonians coterie group and impassioned Blues supporter Bob Moore reminded this week.

“Olivia’s connection with Carlton was solidified through her lifelong friend Pat Carroll. Pat’s brother John was President of the Blue Ensigns from 1983 to and he was obsessed with Carlton,” Moore recalled.

“In those days, John, Lionel Watts, myself and others fronted to the ground to watch the Carlton players train of a Thursday night and we joined the players for soup in the rooms afterwards.

“We’d then find out where the match committee were meeting to select the team, usually in a restaurant or a hotel, and we’d book a nearby table for dinner. I can remember one of Percy Jones’s old watering holes as a selection venue.”

Hopelessly devoted to the Blues, and whenever time and circumstance allowed, Dame Olivia fronted for Carlton matches. When her team met Hawthorn in June 1984, she and the Carrolls watched on from the Heatley Stand.

When the two teams met again on Grand Final day 1986, Olivia performed stirring renditions of Waltzing Matilda and Advance Australia Fair, as part of the pre-match entertainment on the MCG. In Seven’s match-day footage, Peter Dean, Mark Maclure, Wayne Johnston, Paul Meldrum, Craig Bradley and Des English can all be seen in the guard of honour as Dame Olivia sings.

She was also a guest of the Club in the opening round of 2006 when Carlton met Melbourne. This was Marc Murphy’s first game.

In May 2011, proudly sporting her Carlton scarf, Dame Olivia was pictured with then Melbourne President, the late Jim Stynes. By then, Dame Olivia’s battle with breast cancer was well-known and Stynes himself was continuing to undergo cancer treatment. On the subsequent Friday night prior to the Melbourne-Carlton match at the MCG, Dame Olivia performed three of her greatest musical hits from the Ponsford Stand, in assisting with fundraising for the first stage of the Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre development in Heidelberg.