If it’s on film and it’s on Carlton then Miles Wilks is your man.
Wilks is on a mission to preserve archival footage of matches involving the mighty Blues for the future use of the club itself.
And there’s no time to lose either, what with old 16mm and 35mm films beginning to rot on their reels. As Wilks says, “Hopefully there’s some footage out there that we can include in Carlton’s archive, because it’s important for the club’s historic fabric”.
Wilks’ love for Carlton stemmed from his father, who often relates with glee the day he stood behind a Collingwood-supporting priest at the 1970 Grand Final.
“Dad always used to tell me that the priest prayed for the entire match, but his prayers unfortunately didn’t work for him. He used to tell me about Ted Hopkins, a relative nobody who came on and saved the match for Carlton . . . and that’s why I barrack for them,” Wilks says.
Wilks’ interest in safeguarding Carlton film was first fuelled by the then Senior coach David Parkin in 2000, who assisted in sourcing footage of the 1982 Qualifying Final against Hawthorn at the MCG.
“I was trying to access footage of Wayne Harmes kicking four goals in eight minutes of the third quarter of the Qualifying Final,” Wilks recalls. “Anyway we found the third and fourth quarters which was important from a VFL finals perspective and even more important from a Carlton perspective, and from that moment on I decided to keep looking.”
Amongst the treasures unearthed by Wilks is the Carlton-St Kilda Preliminary Final of 1972, “where Alex Jesaulenko got knocked around by Kevin Neale and still managed to kick seven goals”. Or a home and away match at Princes Park in the late 1960s where a marauding dog runs onto the turf not long after “Jezza” boots a goal to the Heatley Stand end.
With the assistance of Carlton’s unofficial historian Stephen Williamson, Wilks recently accessed a number of old Carlton quarters from the 1970s and 80s, most of them on pal or beta format, which he intends to convert to DVD.
It’s all part of a long-overdue commitment to build an online archive of film and photographic material celebrating Carlton’s glorious history as far back as the old VFA days and beyond.
Wilks says that as the Seven Network has not retained as much of its footage for archival purposes, “time is of the essence to get as much of the footage before it deteriorates, because a lot of people out there would probably have videotapes.
He is hugely interested in securing footage of the 1979 second semi-final between Carlton and North Melbourne at Waverley Park. As he says, “Other than the Grand Final, there’s no other match that survives in its entirety in 1979, so if anyone out there had hold of ’79 footage it would be brilliant”.
Carlton is in the throes of establishing an online archive to preserve images and film of its players and teams.
Those prepared to loan any relevant film footage to the Carlton archive are encouraged to email blues@carltonfc.com.au or contact the club on 9387 1400.
