What Melbourne was like when St Kilda won the flag
Yellow Submarine topped the charts, the last Australian executed was about to be hanged and our soldiers were fighting in foreign jungles. On the eve of St Kilda’s return to finals action, take a look back at what Melbourne was like when the Saints last won the flag.
Victoria
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Back in 1966, Homicide and Graham Kennedy’s In Melbourne Tonight were top of the pops on telly, the HR Holden was our best-selling car, prime minister Harold Holt went “all the way with LBJ” to Vietnam and, after decades of fruitless toil, St Kilda won its only VFL premiership.
In this strange, truncated, disconnected AFL season, St Kilda is holding its own in the eight.
There’s still a way to go, but if the Saints could pull off a fairytale, it would give footy-starved Victorians something to celebrate in such a dismal season.
HOW WE PLAYED THE GAME IN 1966
Coach Allan Jeans had his Saints cherry ripe after the disappointment of 1965, when Essendon defeated St Kilda in the Grand Final – and the Saints came out fighting, with eight straight wins through the opening rounds of the 1966 season.
The side dropped only four games out of 18 rounds to finish a close second in the final four behind Collingwood and ahead of Geelong and Essendon on percentage.
It was another sad year for Fitzroy, which won the wooden spoon with a single win over Footscray (by six points) in round 15 at the Brunswick St Oval.
The Lions became footy nomads after the season when it abandoned the Brunswick St Oval. Thirty years later, Fitzroy was no more.
Essendon knocked Geelong out in the first semi-final with a 10-point win, while St Kilda went down to Collingwood by 10 points in the second semi, sending the Pies straight to the Grand Final and St Kilda to a grudge-match preliminary final against the Bombers.
But the Saints handed Essendon a seven-goal hiding to book their place in the grand final.
The grand final quarter-by-quarter margin was no greater than four points all day.
Kevin “Cowboy” Neale was the Saints’ spearhead up forward, with five goals to his name, two to captain Darrel Baldock and singles to youngsters Daryl Griffiths, Jeff Moran and Ian Cooper while the Magpies also kicked 10 for the day.
Scores were level 25 minutes into the final quarter when Wayne Richardson kicked the ball out on the full for Collingwood, gifting St Kilda a free kick to work the ball forward.
In a passage of scrappy play, the ball passed back and forth across the centre line before centre half back Ted Potter shot out a handpass that was intercepted by Saints half forward Barry Breen.
Breen snapped towards the goal but managed only a behind – one of the most famous behinds in Australian rules history – to put St Kilda one point in front.
Collingwood charged forward again but the siren sounded, leaving the Saints winners in what remains the team’s only VFL/AFL flag since it helped found the league in 1897.
In this St Kilda Football Club clip from 2013, Barry Breen reflects on modern footy, the good old days and that point, complete with archival footage from the 1966 grand final.
The Grand Final was the icing on the cake for Saint Ian Stewart, who won back-to-back Brownlow medals in 1965 and 1966.
Ted Fordham from Essendon was the leading goal-kicker in 1966, with 73 home-and-away goals and three more in the finals.
THE WAY WE WERE
In 1966, Melbourne’s population was 2.1 million, with 3.1 million people in Victoria.
We were at the tail end of the post-war baby boom and in the midst of a wave of European migration.
The federal government was so keen to attract more migrants to Australia that it created a series of films depicting idyllic suburban life in a range of Australian cities including Melbourne and Geelong.
Here’s the Life in Melbourne video, starring a young Elspeth Ballantyne of Prisoner fame, which has been preserved by the National Film and Sound Archive.
As Melbourne’s suburbs spread in all directions, the first edition of the mighty Melways was published to guide us to and through these new frontiers.
The 1966 edition is available for all to see on the Melway website.
You’ll see that Melbourne’s first freeway, the South Eastern, extended only from Punt Rd to Burnley St, construction on the West Gate Bridge and a short stretch of the Tullamarine Freeway, northwest from Mickleham Rd, served only as access for the construction of the new Melbourne Airport.
Australia got decimal currency on February 14, 1966, as this NFSA film explains.
The Beatles were on top of the charts in VFL Grand Final week in 1966 with their double A-sided hit single featuring Yellow Submarine (with Ringo doing the singing) and Eleanor Rigby. It spent eight weeks at number one, through September and most of October.
But the top single for the year was Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.
The Rolling Stones played the Palais Theatre in February. Our own Seekers returned from London for a national tour, while The Easybeats left for London seeking fortune and fame with several number one Aussie hits under their belts in 1966 including the iconic Friday On My Mind.
February also spelled the end of six o’clock closing in Victoria’s hotels, meaning revellers after St Kilda’s big grand final win could toast the team until 10pm – and presumably for days afterwards.
The year 1966 was the peak of the drive-in theatre industry in Melbourne, with 19 drive-ins across the suburbs.
Play School debuted on the ABC in July 1966, and actor Gordon Chater of the legendary comedy The Mavis Bramston Show won the Gold Logie that year.
In 1966, debate raged over the fate of Ronald Ryan, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of prison warder George Hodson as Ryan and Peter Walker escaped Pentridge in December 1965.
Ryan hanged on February 3, 1967 despite a public outcry – the last man executed in Australia.
In politics, Sir Henry Bolte notched up his 11th year as Victorian premier while Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies stepped aside on Australia Day after 16 consecutive years in office.
His successor, Harold Holt, became close to US president Lyndon Johnson, who a month after St Kilda’s big win, visited Melbourne as part of his Australian tour, when Mr Holt pledged that Australia was “all the way with LBJ” in Vietnam.
Australian troops had already had one of their most deadly confrontations with North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong forces in the Battle of Long Tan on August 18 that year.
Eighteen Australians were killed and 24 others wounded when the 108 members of D Company, 6 Royal Australian regiment fought off an estimated 1500 enemy troops, killing an estimated 350 and wounding 500 others, on August 18, 1966.
By November, Mr Holt led the Coalition government to a resounding federal election victory, just before public sentiment began to turn against the war.
Apart from LBJ, Victoria had another significant visitor when Prince Charles arrived at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop preparatory school.
READ MORE HISTORY
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