Queen Victoria Market and Footy

Saturday April 29th – We began our day by going to the Queen Victoria Market with Jhaneen. Queen Victoria Market is Victoria's premier open-air market. It's hosts millions of visitors each year and has been a favorite Market to Melburnians for more than 125 years. It is an enormous market something like a swap meet. There are vendors for all kinds of items and a large food sections selling fresh foods and specialty items. We wandered for about an hour and only managed to see about 1/3 of the market.

Then it was of to our first “Footy” game. “Footy” or “Aussie Rules” is what the Aussies call their favorite game, Australian Rules football. Now for a lesson about footy, hopefully I’ll get it right. Footy began in 1857 as a way for cricket players to stay in shape in their off season. Footy grew rapidly but was primarily a Victoria sport until 1987 when other states began to have teams. There are currently 16 teams throughout Australia with the bulk of them still located in Victoria.

Footy is played between two teams of 18 players, on Cricket ovals or similar-sized grassed arenas that vary in size and may be up to 200 yards. The game is different in a lot of ways from our American or “Grid Iron” Football. It is a fast moving and exciting game with fluid and free movement of the ball (partly due to the absence of an offside rule). Play is constant and changes sides frequently. The ball is shaped like our footballs but a bit larger. Players can run with the ball if they bounce it off the ground every 15 meters. They can pass to another player by ‘handballing’ which is an underhanded punch of the ball somewhat like hitting a volleyball. They can also kick the ball to a teammate, if a player catches the kicked ball on the fly (called a ‘mark’) they cannot be tackled and are awarded a free kick. Spectacular high marks, or “speccies”, tackles and fast, fluid play are the game's main attributes as a spectator sport. Points are scored by kicking the ball through poles at each end of the field. There are four poles, if a kick goes through the two center poles 6 points are awarded. If the ball is kicked through the outside poles only one point is awarded.
The guys that play this game are in fantastic shape and are tough blokes. There are no pads or protective gear worn in this sport even though they tackle each other are crash into one another in spectaluar ways when trying to get the ‘marks’! We had a great time and I’m sold as a Footy fan. Apparently we have Footy in the US (it started there in 1997). Hope I can see it played at home. We are planning to go to more games as the season has just begun.