The grand final as an unofficial public holiday

Reference library · 1096 words

For one Saturday near the end of September, Melbourne stops in a way it does not stop for anything else. Shops open late or not at all, the trams into Jolimont run packed from mid morning, and streets that are ordinarily busy go oddly silent for about two and a half hours in the afternoon. The Australian Football League grand final is played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of a crowd of just over a hundred thousand, and a substantial share of the rest of the city watches it on television whether or not anyone in the house barracks for either club.

The first thing to correct is the framing. The grand final weekend is no longer unofficial. Since 2015 the Friday before the grand final has been a gazetted public holiday in Victoria, which means banks shut, penalty rates apply and most workers get the day. The holiday was controversial when it was introduced and is still argued about by retail and hospitality bodies, but it is now simply part of the calendar. What remains genuinely unofficial is the Saturday itself, which is an ordinary working day in law that almost nobody treats as one.

The second correction is that the holiday is Victorian and nothing more. There is no national grand final holiday. Interstate colleagues keep working, which is a reliable source of friction in any organisation with offices in more than one capital. The fixture is a national competition, but the ritual around it is a Melbourne inheritance that the rest of the country has never quite adopted.

Why the ritual settled here

Australian football grew up in Melbourne's parklands in the late 1850s and 1860s and organised itself around suburbs rather than schools or churches. The Victorian Football League was formed for the 1897 season by eight breakaway clubs, and a grand final has been played every year since 1898 with the single exception of 1924. Because clubs were tied to particular places, supporting one was a statement about where you were from: Collingwood at Victoria Park, Richmond at Punt Road, Essendon at Windy Hill, Carlton at Princes Park, Hawthorn at Glenferrie Oval, North Melbourne at Arden Street. Most of those grounds no longer host senior matches, and several of the clubs have moved or merged, yet the suburban labels have proved remarkably durable.

Melbourne's flat, generously reserved land helped. Crown reservations made in the 1840s and 1850s left the city with an unusual quantity of open ground close to the centre, so grounds could be built where people already lived. Independent schools pushed team sport hard, newspapers gave football enormous space, and money from gold and the racing industry paid for grandstands. By the time radio and then television arrived, football already had the audience they needed.

The claim that the game was invented to keep cricketers fit through the winter has a real basis: a letter published in a Melbourne sporting paper in the late 1850s did propose exactly that. The related and much repeated claim that the code was derived from marngrook, an Aboriginal ball game, is contested. There is no firm documentary evidence connecting the two, and historians disagree sharply about it. It is worth stating what is actually known rather than repeating either version as settled.

The ground, the parade and the numbers

The Melbourne Cricket Ground is the reason the day works as a city event rather than a broadcast event. The Melbourne Cricket Club was founded in 1838 and has managed the ground since 1853; the club now has a membership in the tens of thousands and describes itself as a private club with public responsibilities, which is a fair summary of a peculiar arrangement in which a members' club runs the country's largest stadium. Under the current agreement between the league, the club and the Victorian government, the MCG is contracted to host the grand final every year until 2059.

The stadium was rebuilt in stages: the Members' Pavilion in the 1920s, the Olympic Stand for the 1956 Games, the Great Southern Stand in 1992, and a northern redevelopment completed for the 2006 Commonwealth Games that brought capacity to around a hundred thousand with most seats under cover. Anyone quoting the ground's record crowd should note that it belongs to a different building. The 121,696 who attended the 1970 grand final were packed into standing terraces that no longer exist. Current capacity is a little over a hundred thousand, so that record cannot be broken.

Since 1977 a grand final parade has been held around the middle of the Friday, with players from both clubs carried through the city. The route has shifted over the decades, moving between the central streets and the riverside parkland near the ground, so it is worth checking the year rather than assuming. Crowds of well over a hundred thousand have turned out for it. The parade is the reason the Friday holiday made administrative sense: a very large number of people were already taking the day off.

What actually happens on the day

Very few of the people observing the ritual are at the ground. Tickets are almost entirely allocated to members of the two competing clubs, to MCC members and to the league, which means the match sells out most years while ordinary supporters watch elsewhere. The result is a distinctive domestic form: lunch at somebody's house, a barbecue running from late morning, a sweep written out on a scrap of paper, and children playing kick to kick in the street or on a nature strip during the long build up. The televised pre match entertainment is reliably mocked and reliably watched.

Two further caveats are worth keeping. The match has not always been at the MCG. In 1991 it was played at Waverley Park in the outer east while the Great Southern Stand was under construction, and in 2020 and 2021 it was played in Brisbane and Perth because of pandemic border closures, which was a genuine shock to a city that had assumed the fixture was permanent. And the traditional last Saturday in September has become elastic; the league has repeatedly pushed the date into early October, and the game itself no longer always starts in the afternoon. The holiday moves with it.

What survives is the shape of the day rather than its details. Melbourne has organised a large part of its social calendar around a football match for well over a century, and the public holiday beside it is simply the state catching up with something the city had already decided.

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