Rob Hess is an Adjunct Professor with Victoria University. His PhD was the first-ever doctoral study of the history of Australian football, and he has published widely on the development of the code, including award-winning co-authored books, A National Game: The History of AustralianRules Football (Viking/Penguin, 2008), and Play On!: The Hidden Historyof Women’s Australian Rules Football (Echo Publishing, 2016). He has served as the president of the Australian Society for Sports History, and is currently a regional editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport. In his younger days, he managed to play more than 200 games for the Mentone Football Club.