Anti-Football League
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 | |
| Founded | 16 April 1967 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Keith Dunstan |
| Dissolved | c. 2012 |
| Location | |
| Website | antifootballleague.org/ |
The Anti-Football League (AFL) was an Australian organisation which poked fun at the obsession with Australian rules football. It was founded by Melbourne journalist Keith Dunstan in 1967.
The Anti-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?"[1]
Dunstan suggested that a badge should be devised so that league members could recognise each other and that intelligent non-football discussion could take place. The badge was to be in the shape of a red cube, symbolic of an object that would not bounce. The firm of K. G. Luke and Company – which was chaired by Sir Kenneth Luke, the president of the Victorian Football League – volunteered to make the badges,[2] and by July 1967, 5,600 of them had been sold.[3]
The Anti-Football League was known unambiguously as the "AFL" when it was established. This became ambiguous in 1990 when the Victorian Football League changed its name to the Australian Football League.