ALL BEING well, Captain Cripps, fellow leaders Curnow, Walsh and Weitering, and a healthy corps of senior Carlton aspirants of 2025 will complete the short 70-minute flight to Canberra, in the lead-up to the much-anticipated pre-season warm-up with GWS on Manuka Oval.
Eighty-six years earlier, 12 members of the Blues’ drought-breaking 1938 Grand Final victory over Collingwood – Messrs. Anderson, Baxter, Carney, Chitty, Cooper, Francis, Green, Hollingshead, McLean, Park, Price and Wrout – were amongst the touring party who decamped an overnight train in the nation’s capital for what was a midweek exhibition match with Hawthorn at the same venue.
It happened on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 26, 1939 – some five months before Germany invaded Poland to trigger a world war in Europe – and the same day Attorney General Robert Gordon Menzies was sworn in as Australia’s 12th Prime Minister following the death of Joe Lyons.
As a lifelong Carlton devotee AND No.1 Ticketholder, Menzies would have truly warmed to the prospect of his beloved Blues competing with the Mayblooms of Hawthorn – the leafy eastern suburb which co-incidentally fell into his blue ribbon electorate of Kooyong.
The teams had accepted an invitation extended to the VFL from the Canberra Australian National Football League to participate in the exhibition.
In Canberra, a half-day holiday was declared, but there were strings attached for those employed with the Department of the Interior, who could only claim pay for their half-day holiday by attaching a matchday ticket stub as proof of their attendance.
As the then Minister for the Interior not so subtly threatened: “If an employee claims to be an Australian Rules enthusiast, and doesn’t attend the match, he will find himself in trouble. A check will be kept”.
By gametime the city of Canberra was at a virtual standstill. Shops were ordered to close and tickets were snapped up at one shilling and six pence a pop (the equivalent of $7 in today’s currency ) and a special football designed by local identity H.C. Chalker was held aloft by the field umpire prior to the first bounce at 3pm.
This game would set yet another precedent when Duntroon, the military academy that had banned its cadets from indulging in Australian Rules since 1927, allowed a team from the college to take on a Canberra seconds team as a curtain raiser – thus, the Rugby Union fortress had been breached.
In the end, around 8000 Canberrans, at the time effectively half the territory’s population, fronted up – easily eclipsing the previous Canberra record of 3000 set when a touring All Blacks outfit took to the field in 1938.
The match itself was a thrilling affair with Carlton emerging nine-point victors following late goals to Ron “Sox” Cooper and Paul Schmidt.
Amongst the Blues’ better performers were Ken Baxter – the only man of his generation to represent Carlton in the 1938, ’45 and ’47 Grand Final victories, and Jim Park, who within four years would pay with his life fighting the Japanese in defence of an allied airfield in Wau, New Guinea.
(Headline photo credit: Dianne Baxter)
