Letter From Australia:In the mid-1980s, before there was an Australian Football League that united teams from all the mainland states (that is, excluding the island state of Tasmania, which has few people, most of them related), administrators in the country's strongest Australian football competition, the Victorian Football League, made its most pronounced decision in its campaign not just to curb violence, but to cut it out of the game.

The VFL had been formed in 1897. In the eight decades afterwards, the main form of curbing rough or violent play lay with umpires, the Australian football equivalent of referees, who had the power to report a player for an illegal act. The player then faced a tribunal, which heard evidence from both prosecutor and defendant before deciding whether the reported player was guilty of the charge and whether he should be suspended.

Throughout those eight decades, plenty of players suffered broken bones and worse during indiscretions committed out of the line of sight of umpires. If the act was unseen, the perpetrator faced no censure, or at least not from official channels. In a game in which "evening up" was a rite of passage, punishment was usually meted out by the aggrieved team's designated enforcer.

In the mid-1980s, the VFL introduced what was known as "trial by video". Amid uproar from former players who believed that what happened on the ground should stay on the ground, administrators were given the power to watch videotapes of every match and adjudge whether there were any reportable incidents. If an incident was deemed reportable, the player in question was ordered to face the tribunal.

The level of violence in Australian football had been diminishing even before then. As the pace of the game had increased, no longer was there any room for teams to carry a lumbering enforcer. But the advent of trial by video in the mid-1980s made sure that the enforcer was driven from the game. Well, driven from the game on all occasions except the biggest game of all, the grand final, which is Australian football's equivalent of an All-Ireland final.

As the grand final is the last match of the year, and there was no send-off rule, players considered it reasonable to be reported in this match because any penalty would be served the next season. As it was the match in which the stakes were highest, some players considered it almost an honour to be reported while pursuing the ultimate prize.

The nadir of this practice was in 1990, in the last game before the beginning of the Australian Football League. The match was the grand final between Collingwood and Essendon. Players were king-hit from all angles. Veteran Essendon champion Terry Daniher, who had represented Australia during International Rules tours of Ireland a few years previously, was subsequently suspended for 11 matches, one of the strongest penalties given in the history of the game at its highest level.

This incident was, in effect, valedictory to violence. Not only did measures such as trial by video and strict penalties serve to make foul play a feature of the past, but society's expectations changed. No longer was it acceptable to go around donging fellow footballers on the head.

Readers who were outraged by the violence during last year's International Rules Series might think that the above is all bunkum, but it must be stressed that the incidents in the game at Croke Park were out of character for both the Australian and Irish footballers, aberrations in a strange game with rules that divide as well as unite.

The shock in Australia about the incidents was less about what had happened than the fact that it had happened at all. As professional footballers making a lucrative living from the game, AFL players are expected to leave backstreet behaviour to those in the alleyways.

While violence has been all but driven out of Australian football at its highest level, in the AFL, it continues to rear its head, if rarely, in suburban and country football.

It was at a hamlet called Tallygaroopna, about 220 kilometres north of Melbourne, that I witnessed one such disagreement last week between Tallygaroopna and Ardmona.

There were a handful of players on the Ardmona team who gave the entire team the appearance of being thugs. Whenever a Tallygaroopna player was in a contest for the ball, he was likely to emerge from the contest rubbing his head.

The Ardmona players had a particular way of tackling, starting around the shoulders and letting their forearms slip towards their opponent's ears. Because of such a tackling technique's legal origins, in that the tackle had begun in the area around the shoulders, it was not considered reportable. The umpires paid many free kicks for high tackles, but the offence was never deemed serious enough to warrant a report. Sadly, the Tallyagaroopna players knew that whenever they went near the ball they were likely to be clobbered. I've played in similar games in suburban Melbourne and, for an amateur sportsman, it's the worst imaginable experience. No footballer at any level should trot out on to an oval for a game and know that he's going to be pounded around the scone for a couple of hours.

The final straw for me was watching the Tallygaroopna captain take a towering mark, or catch, near the goals and then be ridden into the ground by his Ardmona opponent, who took out his frustration by cuffing the captain's ears. A scuffle ensued in which Tallygaroopna players remonstrated about Ardmona's unnecessary force before the Tallygaroopna captain went back to his mark and kicked the goal that sealed his team a fighting - in the noblest sense of the word - victory. I was at the game because I was writing a report for the Victorian state government about facilities at country football clubs. But after seeing the repeated pillockry of the Ardmona players, I was moved to write a piece for my Melbourne newspaper in which I described Ardmona as two-bit thugs and claimed that their players and officials had the biggest chips on their shoulders I'd seen in a decade of covering local football matches.

Ardmona were shocked and displeased. Their players had been bullying their way through matches for several seasons and no media outlet from outside their immediate area had ever criticised them. Officials demanded to know my motivation for being so critical about a country football club in a metropolitan newspaper.

My main motivation was anger at seeing Saturday afternoon violence in an age in which it has no place. I just happened to be at the Tallygaroopna ground, but once I saw what went on there I felt obliged to do something about it. An uproar resulted and Ardmona's battered rivals felt empowered.

Hopefully, the tactics that I saw will cease in the near future.