11. The impetus for the creation of the game of Australian Rules Football came from members of which drawn out sporting discipline?
From Quiz Aussie Rules Pot Pourri
Answer:
Cricket
The game that came to be known as Australian Rules Football (or Aussie Rules) began to evolve in Melbourne during the middle of the nineteenth century. There were a number of variants being played in the region and the inspiration for these were drawn from the Gaelic football game, ball games played in British parklands and an Aboriginal game known as marngrook. The latter involved kicking a ball, made of an animal skin stuffed with charcoal or feathers, high into the air.
Nothing was formalized or codified until 1858 when a group of cricketers got together to try and find a way to maintain their fitness after the cricket season had ended. This led to a series of games being played between the students from Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar School and these would be recorded by the AFL, the Australian Football League, as the sport's first competitive games.
The following is an extract from the journals of cricketer Tom Wills: "Now that cricket has been put aside for some few months to come, and cricketers have assumed some-what of the chrysalis nature (for a time only 'tis true), but at length will again burst forth in all their varied hues, rather than allow this state of torpor to creep over them, and stifle their new supple limbs, why can they not, I say, form a foot-ball club, and form a committee of three or more to draw up a code of laws." (19 July 1858). Almost a year later Tom, along with six other members of the Melbourne Cricket Club, would establish the first formal rules for the game.