History
Victorian representative teams have participated in games against other Australian states since the 1870s. Originally these games were played between teams representing the major leagues of each state. For Victoria this meant the Victorian Football Association and the Victorian Football League. Between 1976 and 1999 senior state football was played under State of Origin rules.
The first inter-colonial representative game of football was played between Victoria and South Australia in 1879 with teams made up of Victorian Football Association and South Australia Football Association players.
These 'inter-league' matches came to be viewed as the highest tier of Australian Football, with each state's ultimate goal being that of beating Victoria. The most important of these games were the Carnival games that were played intermittently between 1908 and 1993, Victoria winning 13, and coming runners-up in another 9. Some of these carnivals were competed by both the Victorian Football League and Victorian Football Association representative teams. The VFL team was generally regarded as the stronger of the two.
The final senior level State of Origin game, participated in by AFL players was played in 1999, with Victoria beating South Australia by 54 points. Since this game, all Victorian representative teams, except the team that participated in the 2008 AFL Hall of Fame Tribute Match, have consisted of VFL players, competing against players of other state leagues.
Read more about this topic: Victoria Australian Rules Football Team
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“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)