‘National treasure’: How Marc Fiddian wrote the VFA into history across a legendary career

Reluctant to ride his bike on the same route that took him to high school, he never followed the Mustangs, the local club. Instead, after looking up the street directory and deciding his legs could take him to Camberwell, he set out for the Sports Ground.

What he found thrilled him: great players such as Ron O’Neill and Ian Whitten and memorable characters populating a club that had been admitted to the Victorian Football Association in 1926. Years later, he would recall the old-timers still complaining that Camberwell should have won the 1946 premiership.

Fiddian, now 78, was still at school when he thought about writing a book about the Wells. Eventually, he decided the task was beyond him.

“I would have had easy access to people, because they had bugger-all in the way of a following, but I put it in the too-hard basket,’’ he says.

But the idea stayed with him and in 1976, he published East Side Story, A History of Camberwell Football Club. By then he was an established journalist, writing about the VFA for The Age newspaper.

East Side Story was Fiddian’s first book. Many more have followed, on a range of subjects.

He’s up to 130 books and there are others to come; he has started putting together a history of The Metropolitan horse race and has an unpublished manuscript of Melbourne’s tram route 72.

“It starts at Melbourne University, goes down St Kilda Rd, along Malvern Rd and up Burke Rd, and along the way you see some very interesting things,’’ Fiddian says.

He written books about the histories of railway and fire stations, suburbs, post offices, main roads and tramways.He has written them about music, hardware stores, horse racing, cricket and league football.

And, with authority and style, he has written them about the old VFA and its clubs.

After East Side Story, there was Of Lions and Liniment, about Coburg.

The Bullants, dealing with Preston.

The Pioneers, celebrating the association’s centenary in 1977.

Devils At Play, on Oakleigh.

The Blue Boys, about Prahran.

The Roar of the Crowd, a history of VFA grand finals.

All of these came in a 10-year period.

Fiddian later had another burst in which he wrote the histories of Williamstown, Brunswick, Northcote, Waverley, Geelong West, Waverley and Yarraville.

“I felt if they weren’t done, they were never going to be done,’’ he says.

In 2004 came The VFA, A History of the Victorian Football Association, the foreword for which was written by former long-time VFA president Alex Gillon.

Gillon said Fiddian had displayed a “fair and most objective attitude’’ in his reporting of the VFA (which by the 2000s had been rebadged as the VFL and taken in AFL reserves). The writer had extended congratulations when it was earned and criticism when it was warranted, Gillon said.

Among aficionados of the VFA, Fiddian’s work is revered (Coburg legend Phil Cleary calls it “seminal’’).As they see it, his words are the last word on matters VFA.

A few of his admirers believe he should be made a life member of the VFL in recognition of his efforts to preserve the history of a competition that began in 1877.

When Fiddian’s name came up on social media a couple of weeks ago, John Carr, who gained a following with his The Holy Boot blog, called him a “national treasure’’. Long-time VFA supporter George Paras says Fiddian’s football books are “gold’’.

Which is the best of them?

“Awwww,’’ Paras says with a groan, finally settling on The Pioneers, which the VFA commissioned for release in 1977, when it turned 100.

“They’re all brilliant. They display a wealth of knowledge. His knowledge is amazing.’’

Fiddian’s earliest books are hard to get hold of. Copies of The Pioneers, for example, go for $100 on eBay.

And if anyone has a spare copy of Of Lions and Liniment, Coburg senior coach Jamie Cassidy-McNamara would like to know. He has made it his business to track down the book as he tries to press home the Lions’ history to his young players.

Forty years ago, when he was starting out as Coburg’s coach, Cleary did just that; he says he wanted his players to be inspired by the club’s rich heritage.

Cleary had seen the old premiership photos in the social club when he began playing with the Burgers in 1975 and Fiddian’s book “brought the men in the photos to life’’. He says he was mesmerised by the writer’s account of the all-conquering 1926/27/28 premiership teams and how Bob Pratt had kicked 183 goals with Coburg in 1941 alongside captain-coach Lance Collins, one of the greatest players in the game.

Cleary says so much of Coburg’s history would have been buried away in old newspapers if not for Fiddian’s “passion and exquisite research and writing skills’’.

“It wasn’t just Coburg’s history he lovingly restored and documented,’’ he says.

“In his The Pioneers, he reminded people that the VFA was out first football competition and that it was here that legendary clubs Collingwood and Carlton began their football journeys.

“Such was his attention to detail, Fiddian would declare, ‘Carlton players, it appears, were the first to use leather stops on their boots’. So too did he note how the VFA had instituted a rule that players ‘persisting in disputing an umpire’s decision … shall be liable to disqualification’. Today, we call it dissent, but unfortunately no football commentator has thus far seen fit to acknowledge how the doyen of VFA history writing, Marc Fiddian, put the question of ‘dissent’ on the agenda nearly 50 years ago.’

“Such is the quality of Fiddian’s body of work, he truly is a legend of the game.”

*****

Marc Fiddian joined The Age late in 1962, in a clerical role in the editorial section, delivering the mail, filing the papers, taking messages and assorted other mundane tasks. He moved into reporting in September, 1964, starting in the sports department.

The newcomer was given the VFA beat in 1965.

He was content with it.

“The Age was a very competitive place,’’ he says.

“You had to do something that set you apart, whether it was writing politics or horticulture, you had to be a specialist in that area, and I thought I could do the VFA better than anybody, because I knew more about it and you had it to yourself.

“You were left alone. I’ve never been a team player. I’ve always been an individual and that suited me.’’

Fiddian spent two years covering league football and did some sub-editing before returning to the VFA round in 1976. He also contributed a weekly column to The Recorder.

How big was the VFA at its peak?

“Well it depends on when the peak was,’’ Fiddian says.

“This is something that’s been debated. Some people say it was in the early 1920s, when Footscray was a powerful club and the others tried to keep up, or the late ’40s, when Williamstown was probably the best club.’’

Fiddian says he had no ambitions to be a journalist – he had thought about school teaching.

“I must say that out of all the time I spent in journalism, a lot of it was under sufferance.

“It wasn’t a job I always liked, and one of the reasons I’ve kept writing and been so prolific in the past 20 years has been to get some job satisfaction. That was something I never got in my earlier years. It just didn’t please me. It wasn’t really what I wanted.’’

Just before he turned 40, he took a part-time position at the Leader suburban newspaper group, working there for 19 years. By that stage, he was focusing on his books.

Of course, many of the clubs he was reporting on for his newspapers and which he wrote books about have closed their doors. Camberwell, the club he followed as a schoolboy, dropped out on the eve of the 1991 season after a few years of struggle.

What happened to the VFA?

“The VFA didn’t survive because it couldn’t compete financially with the league,’’ Fiddian says.

“Once the league became an industry and started to get corporations backing the clubs, that was it.

“The VFA was largely, as Alex Gillon put it, village playing village, say for example the village of Northcote playing the village of Preston or the village of Camberwell playing the village of Prahran.’’

And, of course, the league began to muscle in on Sunday football; at first with reserves games, then, in 1979, with the televising of matches from Sydney.

The death knell of the VFA was sounded that day, Fiddian says.

*****

Marc Fiddian has no plans to stop writing books.

He did have the Raccoon Tail Books imprint, but for about 10 years has been publishing through BookPOD.

As the name implies, they are printed on demand.

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Most days, Fiddian takes himself out to a bungalow at the back of his home in Melbourne’s east and taps away at his keyboard.

Are there any more football titles on the way?

“I’ve always said I’ve written too many as it is!’’ he says.