John Acraman brings Victorian-rules football to South Australia: key 1860 meeting with Henry Harrison at inn
Businessman John Acraman became a captain of the original Adelaide Football Club, formed in 1860, at the Globe Inn on the corner of Rundle Street and Stephens Place, Adelaide city.
Prominent English-born early businessman John Acraman is credited with bringing Australian football to South Australia.
Acraman’s diverse business interests, after arriving in the colony in 1846, included coastal and River Murray shipping, insurance, pastoral management, agents for Guinness Stout. He was on the board of governors of St Peter's College, a collector of fine arts and one of the oldest members of the Adelaide Club.
Acraman was also a keen sportsman and later an official of the South Australian cricket, rowing and lacrosse associations. He had played English football at both Bath and Clifton and, in the late 1850s, sent "home" for a few round balls. Acraman is reputed to have erected the first set of goal posts used in the colony.
In 1860 at Adelaide’s Globe Inn, Acraman, with William Fullarton and Robert Cussen, met Henry Harrison who, with Tom Wills, “father of the Victorian game” of football. The original Adelaide Football Club, founded on April 26, 1860, at the Globe Inn was South Australia’s first Australian (then Victorian)-rules football club. Acraman became captain of one of the Adelaide club teams, with John Brodie Spence (brother of reformer Catherine Helen Spence) leading its other team.
An avid player during the 1860s, Acraman was still directly involved in the game, as president of the Adelaide club, when the South Australian Football Association was formed in 1877. He was one of 10 vice presidents appointed by the South Australian Football Association (to later become the South Australian National Football Leage) at its inaugural meeting, and he later also spent time as vice president of the North Adelaide Football Club.
Acraman was dubbed the “father of South Australian football" for his role in introducing the (Victorian) game to the colony. In 2002, he was inducted into the South Australian Football Hall of Fame.
