THE Carlton Football Club archive is the welcome beneficiary of incredible colour footage of Ron Barassi’s 50th and final game as a player, some 54 years after the event.

Carlton has acquired the digitised film through the generosity of the acclaimed Melbourne-based independent filmmaker and lifelong Blues devotee Nigel Buesst. Buesst, then a stringer for the ABC, was on hand at Princes Park with his trusty Olex 16mm camera on the afternoon of Saturday 17 May 1969 - 64 days before Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon - when Carlton met Barassi’s former club Melbourne in Round 7.

Now 87, Barassi, a six-time Melbourne premiership player through 204 games in 12 seasons before his monumental move to Carlton as Captain-Coach in early 1965, had come out of retirement to play his 50th game for the Blues to ensure that his two boys Ron and Richard were eligible for selection by both clubs under the father-son rule as it then stood.

In a previous interview with Herald Sun reporter Glenn McFarlane, Barassi revealed his motives for the comeback.

“It was my 50th game for Carlton and (it) meant that my sons could play for the Blues or the Demons if they wanted to. I also had the feeling that our running game had started to drop off and I wanted to get it going again,” Barassi said.

“As it turned out, my last game was against Melbourne. John Beckwith, who was coaching the Demons, reckoned I was treating them with contempt by making the comeback. It might have looked that way, but it wasn’t.”

The Carlton coach was 33 years and 80 days old when he followed John Nicholls down the race that Saturday, having relinquished the captaincy to Nicholls following his on-field retirement after the Round 19, 1968 match against Fitzroy at the Carlton ground.

Regrettably a torn hamstring sustained in the third quarter brought an anti-climatic end to Barassi’s playing career, but following a quick shower and change he returned to deliver a typical fire-and-brimstone address to the players. Whatever ‘Barass’ said had the desired effect, as Carlton reversed a six-point deficit at the final change to emerge 30-point victors over the Melbourne 20 — amongst them, the late Australian Test medium-fast bowler Max Walker, then a ruckman for the Redlegs.

On the Monday after he wore the famous No.31 on his back, Barassi told a football scribe: “On Sunday I had my first taste of what it is really like to be retired – and quite frankly I didn’t like it one bit”.

“But it is a fact of life I have to live with, and I certainly can’t complain about the length of time I’ve been fortunate enough to spend in League football.”

Buesst’s film captures Princes Park on a wet and muddy Autumn afternoon. Featured is the Ald. Gardiner Stand and the old press box, either side of the television scaffolding and the playing field is encircled by the old white picket fence to which kids armed with their Footy Records cling. Within the pickets, Barassi can be seen in the famous No.31 for the final time.

Barassi’s three quarter-time address is also captured by Buesst, who shoots footage of the Carlton huddle over the shoulder of the then Chairman of Selectors Jack Wrout. Barassi, in civilian dress, having presumably changed and showered after earlier leaving the field with injury, can be seen delivering a typical address to the likes of Collins, Gill, Kerr, Lofts, Nicholls, Silvagni and Waite – and a fresh-faced Bruce Doull (sans beard, long hair and headband) in the third of his 356 senior games.

On leaving the ground following the address, Barassi is also filmed raising his hands in a spooking gesture to the cameraman.

“I had 100 ft of Kodachrome in the Olex and strode up to Princes Park. There was action at Princes Park and it was ‘away we go,” Buesst said.

“In revisiting that film, you are reminded of how people rise to the pre-eminence of being a celebrity, which has been particularly so since television came in – and Ron Barassi was, from his premierships with Melbourne through to his transfer to Carlton and his subsequent retirement – on a par with the likes of Shane Warne and others - and sport is an Australian religion.”      

Now 85, Buesst’s life has been dedicated to filmmaking. After graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce at Melbourne University in 1960, he relocated to London and worked as an assistant editor at Shepperton Studios.

On returning to Melbourne two years later, Buesst found work at the ABC’s Ripponlea newsroom, and freelanced as a cameraman on various productions at the time he shot the Barassi film. He also worked his craft as an independent filmmaker, beginning with ‘Fun Radio’ in 1963.

Following the success of his film ‘Rise and Fall of Squizzy Taylor’, Buesst embarked on a career in teaching at the Swinburne University of Technology (1970-1984) whilst continuing to make films on a diverse range of subjects. He was also a co-founder and artistic director of the St Kilda Film Festival from 1986 to 1990.

Buesst has been described as “a living legend of Melbourne’s film scene” and was a prominent figure in the “Carlton wave” of Australian filmmaking.

He has now given the Carlton Football Club a precious gift, as a thank you for the 75 years in which its teams have - for the most part - brought him unbridled joy. To think that his allegiances to the mighty Blues were first forged through what he said was “my first encounter with a rough nut from Brunswick . . . and I’ve been with them ever since”.

“I was having my appendix taken out at the Mercy Hospital East Melbourne and this guy came around and asked all us kids who we barracked for,” Buesst recalled. “I asked him ‘What does barrack mean?’, to which he replied: ‘Are you being lippy mate? I’d advise you to barrack for Carlton because we’re going to win the Grand Final’ – which they famously did by a point in 1947.

A long-time resident in the Carlton area, Buesst family linkages can be sourced to the 1850s when his grandmother, a Birmingham migrant, first settled in Carlton. A forefather established the BBB (Buesst and Bills Bros.) Mattress Factory in South Melbourne and did very well out of that, “and I’ve been living the high life ever since”.

Buesst’s great love of films actually predates his love of the football club.

“When I was about eight a teacher said to me ‘Nigel, I think you need to come and help us project films which come in every week to a rental place in West Melbourne. I remember one week they put up ‘The Red Shoes’, which was about a ballet dancer who collapsed like a red balloon,” he said.

“The week after a film came up called ‘The Fighting Lady’, which was about an aircraft carrier winning the Second World War for the Yanks – and I worked as the projectionist with the Bell and Howell (motion picture camera) and been at it ever since.”

When asked why he saw fit to contact Carlton with his enduring Barassi film, Buesst replied: “I’m mindful that unless you nurture bits of old film it just disappears”.