IN THE domain of Australian Rules football, success is often measured in premiership cups – at Carlton, by the 16 trophies earned across almost 120 years of League competition.

And yet, what is arguably the Club’s most coveted prize takes the form of a diminutive sterling silver goblet, handcrafted by a master silversmith and earned on a muddy afternoon in Albert Park in the spring of 1871 - a trophy that predates the Australian Football League, Victorian Football League and Victorian Football Association.

This is the story of the South Yarra Presentation Challenge Cup - Carlton’s lost ‘Holy Grail’ - and the lengths to which the Club went to retrieve the precious long-lost relic. For the cup is considered Carlton’s first trophy since its inception in 1864, and the last of three such cups contested by the major metropolitan teams.

By way of background, first was the Caledonian Challenge Cup donated by the Royal Caledonian Society of Melbourne and awarded to Geelong in perpetuity in 1864. The cup’s whereabouts are unknown to this day.

Next came the Athletic Sports Committee Challenge Cup, valued at ten guineas, which was awarded to South Yarra in perpetuity in 1866. The cup was long thought forever lost, but it unexpectedly resurfaced in 2007, having been inherited by a distant descendant of South Yarra President John Steavenson in Bristol – and has subsequently been loaned to the National Sports Museum.

No cup was contested between 1867 and 1869. But this story begins 156 years ago when South Yarra, one of the pre-eminent clubs in the colony at the time, purchased and donated a silver cup to be contested by the teams who finished first and second on aggregate in 1870 - in what was a five-team competition where finals had not yet been instituted.

Albert-park, with four wins and five draws, claimed permanent ownership of the cup in season ’70, but when the legitimacy of a match involving that team an undermanned Railway was brought into question, the trophy was returned to South Yarra.

The South Yarra Challenge Cup was again offered for competition in 1871, and while Albert-park declined to contest it, the club continued to field teams. The remaining three clubs – Carlton, Melbourne and South Yarra – resolved that their sides would each meet the other three times during the season, with the top two to contest a single playoff for the cup.

By season’s end, Carlton (with victories of Albert-park, Geelong, Richmond and South Yarra) and Melbourne were clear qualifiers for the Challenge Cup playoff – and the match was scheduled for the old Emerald Hill Ground (within the area bounded by City Road, Albert Road and Clarendon Street) at three o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday 7 October, 1871.

Before an extraordinary audience of 25,000, many of whom spilled onto the ground, Carlton captain John Donovan won the toss and elected to kick with the wind. Donovan’s men then engaged in a brutal 18-a-side struggle across three hours with Melbourne – and when the dust settled, Carlton, through goals to James Clarke and Billy Dedman secured the 2-0 victory and permanent ownership of the South Yarra Presentation Challenge Cup.

The cup itself was a work of art. Standing 22 centimetres tall, it was fashioned by William Edwards, a London-born silversmith of choice for Melbourne’s elite. Edwards, whose workshop stood at the top end of Collins Street, was famous for its intricate craftsmanship, and the 1871 cup was no exception — a silver goblet engraved with the proud declaration of Carlton’s dominance.

Donovan and his on-field heroes were photographed for posterity at Carlton’s Annual General Meeting of 1872 - as was the cup whose silver glimmered in the flashbulbs of the era.

The photograph of the cup, which later appeared on a carte de visite, would prove crucial.

In 1885, the South Yarra Presentation Challenge Cup was presented to long-serving secretary Tom P. Power as a token of the Club’s appreciation. By the 1920s, the precious cup was still known to be in the possession of the Power family, but then it vanished – and despite the various public appeals and online manhunts of the past 15 years, its whereabouts remain unknown.

Perhaps it’s sitting in a dusty attic or an unrecognised private collection, its significance to Carlton forgotten by its custodian.

In early 2024, Carlton CEO Brian Cook suggested to this reporter (and resident club historian) that a quote for the replication of the lost 1871 cup be sourced through a local Melbourne silversmith. When the silversmith advised that an identical hand-made sterling silver goblet would cost as much as $20,000 to replicate, another course of action was taken – and fate intervened through a simple Google search.

In sourcing 19th century silverware on the Carter’s Price Guide to Antiques website, an image of a goblet, a molecular clone of the lost 1871 cup, jumped off the screen. The item had fetched $2280 at a Sydney auction in 2017 and crucially bore the maker’s mark of the same Collins Street silversmith - William Edwards.

Engraved into the “twin” was script acknowledging the cup’s recipient - Peter John Heath Petherick, a beloved local figure and former rate collector in neighbouring Collingwood – who was presented with the cup in 1867.

Petherick’s story is as rich as the silver itself. He was a bookseller who arrived in Melbourne in 1853 with nothing but 400 books and a young family, who rose to become the landlord of the Studley Arms Hotel and a pillar of the local inner city community.

The hunt for the Petherick cup led Carlton from an auction house in Sydney’s inner west to the buyer - a silver collector who, moved by the Club’s quest, agreed to sell the piece.

On 26 August 2024, the South Yarra Challenge Cup replica safely arrived at IKON Park in a parcel box.

This tale took a poetic turn in tracing a descendant of the man whose name was featured on the cup, Peter Petherick. Trevor Worth, now in his 80s living in Western Australia, confirmed a kindred connection with the Pethericks, and revealed a startling coincidence: Peter’s son, Julius Evan Petherick was himself a Carlton footballer.

Julius represented the old dark Navy Blues in the late 1870s before relocating to the mining town of Burra Burra to work as a watchmaker. Not long after, he tragically died of pneumonia at the tender age of 29, leaving behind an infant daughter.

The Petherick goblet, created by the same hands as those which fashioned Carlton’s first trophy and once owned by the father of a former player of yesteryear, had effectively “come home”. The Petherick script on one side of the cup remains intact, but the following has been engraved on the opposite side, in keeping with the script visible in the original carte de visite photo:

SOUTH YARRA PRESENTATION CHALLENGE CUP
Won By
Carlton Football Club
SEASON 1871

While the search for the original 1871 South Yarra Presentation Challenge Cup continues, the acquisition of the Petherick goblet provides a tangible bridge to the past.

The ‘Holy Grail’ may still be out there somewhere. But in the Petherick cup, Carlton has uncovered something just as precious: a shared acknowledgement of craftsmanship, community and the Club’s enduring spirit.