By Carlo Carli, President, Brunswick Zebras
Brunswick Zebras Football Club is a direct descent of the Melbourne Juventus Club. Today it is a large community club based in Sumner Park, Brunswick East. After starting out as an Italian club, it is now an all-inclusive club, with male and female teams and with players from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. On any Sunday morning in winter the clubrooms at Sumner Park can always be relied on for a good espresso coffee, showing the club’s Italian origins.
Brunswick Zebras started out as part of the Melbourne Juventus football team. Their successes in the 1950s allowed it to perform a leading role in the formation of a local Italian identity. Playing football was always important to young Italian men but forming a club for the community had deeper significance. Prior to WWII the club was known as Savoia. Savoia had two teams with names that were clearly fascist – Avanguardisti and Balilla. In 1939 the authorities disbanded it and Club Secretary Rino Fontana hid the equipment.
At the time being Italian was tough – they had been enemy aliens and many had been sent to internment camps. Furthermore the community had been polarised by the issue of fascism from the 1930s, with clashes of opinions between supporters of fascist Italy and fervent anti-fascists.
In 1948 a football-loving priest Fr Agostino Galanti, who had come to Australia as a prisoner of war chaplain, decided the community needed a team. Fontana and Galanti joined forces and opened the old equipment trunk, hidden since 1939, and took out the light blue jumpers of Savoia and covered the Savoy coat of arms with a tricolore. The name Juventus was chosen because in Italy, Juventus is identified as the team of Italy. Juventus soon united the Italian community while winning six consecutive titles.
Juventus also helped change the face of local football. It took soccer out of the paddocks. Teams were dressed properly, drinking beer was not allowed at half time and the players entered the ground in a line and greeted the crowd. Against the strict rules of the amateur governing body they paid players. These payments were controversial with the approaching Melbourne Olympics. Finally the Australian Olympic Council made its decision: Australia went into the tournament without a number of its ‘professional’ players and players from the ‘ethnic’ clubs were effectively banned from playing in the 1956 Olympics.
As the Italian community grew and settled, new football and social clubs were established and Juventus lost its centrality in life of the Italian community. Eventually the senior men’s teams left Brunswick to seek opportunities in other parts of Melbourne, leaving behind what had been their junior teams. These junior teams became Brunswick Zebras, which have continued to provide football opportunities for girls and boys in inner Northern Melbourne.
Sources:
Martin, Egilberto. Juve! Juve!, Elabor Helena Nominees, Brooklyn VIC, 1990