A FOOTBALL club is the sum of many parts, not just the starting 22 – and in this the 160th year of the Carlton Football Club’s existence, it’s both timely and fitting that the 60th anniversary of its first and longest-serving coterie group The Carltonians should also be acknowledged.

It was back in the club’s Centenary Year of 1964 that The Carltonians first came together, on the cusp of Carlton’s audacious signing of Ronald Dale Barassi as captain-coach.

Amongst the coterie’s pioneers was the Melbourne City Councillor Ray Lawson, and staunch Carlton loyalists like Malcolm Payne, Robert Moore, Ralph Rosenfield, Ray Gilbert and Lionel Watts followed.

The Carltonians’ Patron, the football club’s greatest player John Nicholls, was chasing the leather when the coterie was founded.

“The Carltonians were so helpful to the players back then, from providing them with work opportunities to helping with their taxes and investments,” Nicholls recalled.

“When the Carltonians started there was a group of three or four blokes - Maurie Nathan, Leo Curtis, Laurie Newton and Ray Lawson. They used to gather in a mezzanine in the old Carlton rooms, which required a steward, and the steward was my older sister’s husband Bob Maxwell.”

While none of the original foundation members of The Carltonians are still living (the last of them, William Austin Cook, died on Australia Day 2012 having completed an unparalleled 48 years’ service to the coterie), true Blues such as Moore and Zappulla continue to fly the flag.

Today, The Carltonians of 2024 truly reflect the football club’s “Stronger Together” catchline and welcome inclusivity.

Yvonne Hill, The Carltonians Committee Chair and a former member of the Blues Coterie who replaced Chris Ott in the role after Covid-19 hit – is living, breathing proof that togetherness forms part of the club’s entire DNA.

“I have been a Carlton supporter all my life and while I was thrilled and flattered to be asked to chair the committee, at the back of my mind I was thinking ‘Am I really here as a token?’,” Hill conceded.

“I was fortunate that I already had an association with ‘Crippa’ (Patrick Cripps) and ‘Doc’ (Sam Docherty), as one of my businesses was to mind people’s cats and dogs while they were on holidays, which is what I did for them. That was a lovely connection with the players who, as is the case with all Carlton people, are truly wonderful - and in the end the decision to commit to The Carltonians was an easy one.”

At 64, Hill, the daughter of a Maltese immigrant father and French immigrant mother, lays claim to a Carlton childhood connection. When her parents sailed into Australia after the Second World War, Hill’s maternal grandfather, who also disembarked the ship, took occupancy of a milk bar in the local Carlton area – and it was her maternal uncle Paul Borg who persuaded her to follow the mighty Blues.

Hill never ventured into the Carlton ground as a child on matchdays as her parents were North supporters and her brother Andy Camilleri was chasing the leather for South Melbourne in the days of Bob Skilton and Max Papley.

But she remembers tuning into Carlton games on the transistor radio from the sanctity of her backyard on Saturdays, eagerly awaiting for the Sunday critiques on ‘World of Sport’ and cramming her scrapbook with Carlton clippings from the Monday papers.

Though she’s a great people’s person, Hill conceded she was never an eloquent public speaker, so had a real aversion to addressing The Carltonians from the lectern – until she crossed paths with a Carlton legend at her first coterie function in the chair.

“When I told members of the committee that I wasn’t good at public speaking on matchdays, they assured me not to worry as they’d enlist the services of an MC,” Hill recalled.

“But at the very first engagement John Nicholls asked if I was going to speak, and when I said no he replied ‘You’ve got to get up’. So I had no choice even though I had nothing prepared, but I got through and was right from then on.”

The Carltonians under Hill’s watch have steadily moved with the times - and it has endured, as she explained, due to the togetherness of its members.

As she said: “We are a club within a club with the ultimate aim of supporting the football club, and as everyone has the same objective there’s total unity”.

Santo Zappulla, a long-serving former committeeman and treasurer, these days makes a point of greeting all guests at every match-day function.

At the time of writing, Zappulla, who joined The Carltonians in 1981, is second only to Watts as the coterie’s second longest-serving member.

In June 1954, Zappulla, together with his mother and two brothers, bid farewell to their native Catania in Sicily. Together they boarded the Lloyd Triestino ship Oceania and a month later lugged their suitcases down the gangway and onto Melbourne soil – to be reunited with Zappulla’s father who had migrated two years previous.

“I was 11 when I came to Australia and we originally settled in East Brunswick,” Zappulla recalled.

“After I started school at St Ambrose in Brunswick, the Marist Brothers would lead the kids down to the ground at Princes Park, so it was Carlton, Carlton, Carlton. Then John Benetti and Sergio Silvagni came along, and I’ve bled blue ever since.”

In those days, membership of the coterie was by invitation only, and Zappulla was fortunate in being welcomed into the fold by Lional Watts and another long-serving Carltonian the late Albert Millson.

Santo will be welcoming guests in typical fashion when The Carltonians celebrate 60 years at Carlton’s final home and away match of the season against St Kilda at Marvel Stadium.