The Hafey Years: Reliving a Golden Era at Tigerland
Australian History Local History Sports Biography Australian Football History AFL Memoir Collectible Sports Books 20th-Century Melbourne Culture
The Hafey Years: Reliving a Golden Era at Tigerland is the definitive hard-cover tribute to Tommy Hafey’s reign at Richmond, capturing the four-premiership dynasty that turned the Tigers into an AFL powerhouse. Author Elliot Cartledge, a lifelong Tiger insider, blends 400 pages of fresh interviews, rare match-day photos and behind-the-scenes anecdotes to show how Hafey’s relentless fitness crusade, family culture and “eat the opposition alive” ethos transformed a struggling club into the most feared team of the late-1960s and early-’70s. First-edition copies in very-good condition—complete with the original dust jacket—are already scarce, making this 2011 Weston Media release a prized keepsake for serious collectors of Australian football history.
Beyond the on-field glory, the book drills into the social fabric of Melbourne during football’s golden broadcast era: the birth of colour TV, the suburban grounds that packed in 80,000 fans, and the grassroots community that lived every heartbeat with the yellow-and-black. Cartledge tracks the players—Bartlett, Walls, Bourke, Hart, Raines—through their post-match jobs as milkmen, plumbers and teachers, illustrating how Hafey’s ethic of “hard work on and off the paddock” forged a brotherhood that still reunites every year. Readers looking for a nostalgic journey through Tigerland’s most triumphant decade will find page after page of match statistics, season summaries and never-before-published dressing-room stories that even the most dedicated fans haven’t heard.
For collectors, this first-edition hardback is the flagship volume of any Richmond or AFL antiquarian shelf. At 240 mm high and wrapped in a vibrant dust jacket, it displays beautifully alongside vintage jumpers, programmes and signed guernseys. Because the print run was modest and no subsequent reprints have been authorised, clean copies in protective jackets are increasingly snapped up by memorabilia investors and ex-players gifting the story to the next generation. Secure yours now to own the authoritative, officially endorsed record of the Hafey era—before the remaining first editions disappear into private collections.
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