Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps

So, as the Melbourne Football Club began its successful assault on the AFL flag, I was finishing a biography of the club’s former premiership captain coach Sir Albert Chadwick.

I was commissioned by the MCC to do the book on Sir Albert, a former president of the club, who, as it happened, was one of those old-fashioned types - a nation builder and self-made man, starting with a tough upbringing in country Victoria, his time in the Middle East with the Australian Flying Corps in WW1, bumping heads with Premier Henry Bolte over domestic gas, to playing an important role with Australia’s overseas satellites. And then there was the footy.

Available at the MCC for Demon diehards and those interested in a rich life lived in the public gaze.