Origins of Australian Football: Victoria's Early History. Volume 1 Amateur Heroes and the Rise of the Clubs, 1858 to 1876

This is volume 1 in a series of four volumes about the origins of Australian football as it evolved in Victoria between 1858 and 1896. This volume addresses its very beginnings as an amateur sport and the rise of the first clubs. Invented by a group of Melbourne cricketers and sports enthusiasts, Australian Rules football was developed through games played on Melbourne's park lands and was originally known as "Melbourne Football Club Rules". This formative period of the game saw the birth of the first 'amateur heroes' of the game. Players such as T.W. Wills, H.C.A. Harrison, Jack Conway, George O'Mullane and Robert Murray Smith emerged as warriors engaged in individual rugby-type scrimmages. The introduction of Challenge Cups was an important spur for this burgeoning sport. Intense competition and growing rivalries between clubs such as Melbourne, South Yarra, Royal Park, and Geelong began to flourish and the game developed as a result. By the 1870s the game "Victorian Rules" had become the most popular outdoor winter sport across the state. In subsequent decades, rapid growth in club football occurred and the game attracted increasing media attention.

Spotlight on ... Philately : a tale of two postage stamps - following the things

I found it on eBay: ‘Jamaica GB used in 1858 6d x 2 sg Z5 used on piece A01 [Kingston] 1858’. Offered for sale by a stamp dealer on the Isle of Man was a scrap of blue paper, apparently part of an old envelope or torn off a sealed, folded letter, on which was stuck an attached pair of British postage stamps, each bearing the image of a young Queen Victoria

Popular Science

Review of The Anatomist by Bill Hayes (Scribe, 2008). Bill Hayes wanted to write about Henry Gray, the author of Gray's Anatomy (1858), which at least until the television series connoted a standard text for anatomy students. Perhaps even more seductive for the biographer than the book's enduring appeal was a sense that Gray himself had partly disappeared from the historical record. Here was a scientist with the sort of brilliant young mind that seemed a specialty of the Victorian Age, and yet one who had not benefited from that period's compulsive documenting of the men of the moment and their deeds. Surely in that mystery there lay a narrative...