Newcastle Australian Football League
After the 1999 season, the NAFL merged with the Central Coast AFL to form the Black Diamond Australian Football League.
The history of Australian rules football in the Hunter Region dates back to 1881 when a club named Northumberland was founded.
Three brothers, George, Jim and John Duguid introduced the sport in 1883 and had previously played football on the goldfields of Ballarat.
An exhibition game was played in Easter of 1889 in the town of Dungog, north of Maitland, with Merewether joining the NDFA that same year.
Exhilaration in Australian rules intensified around the same time as the Black Diamond Challenge Cup was introduced by the Northern District FA.
Later in 1889 a combined Northern District side travelled to Victoria to play a series of matches against the VFA, Ballarat, Carlton, St Kilda and Fitzroy.
In 1889, a donation of five guineas[clarification needed] each from Northern Districts Football Association (Australian Rules) patron[1] Mr. Stewart Keightley and the proprietors of the Newcastle Morning Herald led to the procurement of the Junior Challenge Cup.
A number of clubs had competed in the NDFA from 1881 to 1894 due to the popularity of football, but many had folded within a year, often due to lack of experience 1881: Northumberland 1883: Lambton, Singleton, Newcastle City, Wallsend & Plattsburg 1885: West Maitland Half Holiday Club 1886: Stockton 2nds, Carlton 2nds, Summer Hill, Mount Zion, Rix's Creek, Morpeth 1887: Our Boys 2nds, Hamilton, Northumberland 2nds, Oakhampton 2nds, Lochinvar 1888: Wallsend Juniors, Merewether, Burwood United 1890: Tighes Hill, Broadmeadow Juniors, Charlestown, Vulcans, Rovers, Hamilton Juniors[4] Some unsuccessful attempts were made to restore Australian rules in Newcastle in 1903, 1919 and 1935.
The league saw the entry of industry-based clubs BHP, Nailworks and Rylands, as well as the code's confinement to people working in the industry.
The sporting public of Newcastle didn't accept Australian rules football, with rugby league being the most popular code in the region by this time, and crowds were small at games with only three to four teams making up the competition.
St Kilda, who were now in the Victorian Football League, visited Newcastle again in 1922, making the NARFL confident that the game would gain ground again.
During the early 1920s unemployment and legacies from World War I that had ended just four years prior, brought Newcastle to a halt, prompted a number of its population to move away and saw the recession of the league in 1922 and 1923, which destroyed the minuscule possibility of the sport's revival.
The game returned with the help from players from Sydney, Broken Hill and various other places across Australia trying to find jobs in the post-depression industry.
Again, Newcastle's sporting community weren't supportive of Australian rules, with the league being abandoned again in 1939 at the start of World War II.
From 1943 until 1945, Newcastle industrial worker Alan Gilpin organised social matches of Australian rules between army camps in Maitland and Singleton.
However, the sport couldn't bear the recession in the early 1960s sufficiently, which saw the loss of many players, crowd numbers dropping and poor administration which was damaging to the NANFL.
The league hit its worst point in 1969 with only three known club to field a senior team, no liaison with schools and junior football to be scrapped altogether.
Bill Elliott, a former Australian wrestling champion from Victoria, undertook the role of President of the NANFL to salvage the struggling competition.
However the disregarding of the game by the Newcastle public and the uncertainty of the sport's future within the region caused the fortunes of football within schools to fluctuate.
By 1970, three new clubs had joined the senior league with the sport gaining momentum when a representative team from Newcastle won the New South Wales Country Championships in 1971.
VFL clubs North Melbourne and Geelong were invited to play a promotional game in Newcastle in 1975, organised by the NAFL to '.
The NAFL, after requesting more time to pay Ansett, imposed a series of levies on its clubs, which were to be paid in five instalments over the course of twelve months.
