ABSTRACT
Rugby had always seen itself as the game of British imperial nationalism, and thanks to Tom Brown’s Schooldays it spread across the English-speaking world. Nowhere was this truer than in Australia and especially in Melbourne. Barely two decades after the city had been founded, young middle-class men in the city had adapted rugby rules to create their own football code, which would become known as Australian Rules. Nowhere else was a code and a city so intertwined. Yet far from being a symbol of Australian separateness, Melbourne football was no less a symbol of Britishness than anywhere else in the British Empire.
