With school holidays now upon us, it’s rather timely a photograph captioned “Carlton v Fitzroy Boy Barrackers” and thought to be around 120 years old, has turned up in a shed on a property in the northern Victorian town of Lancefield.

Presumably captured at Princes Park in the early 1900s, the image features upwards of 150 animated schoolboys, thought to have been city types, perched on the terraces behind the pickets and cheering on their heroes from a leafy nook of the old ground.

At the bottom right hand corner of the image can be found an address - 252 Collins Street, Melbourne. This is presumably the third floor studio of the English-born photographer John Alfred Sears, whose studio  was on the third floor of the Pianola Hall at that address. A Carlton team photo captured in 1903 is attributed to Sears.

While there is little in the way of identification of either the subjects or the year in which they gathered to see Carlton and the Maroons play, one clue relates to the name ‘Caine’, which appears in lead pencil on the back of the photograph’s frame. Could this be Frank ‘Silver’ Caine, Carlton’s long-kicking forward whose 80-games included the 1906 and ’07 Grand Final victories?

The photograph was recently found amongst a plethora of household items discovered on the property vacated by descendants of a family who raised Caine as a foster child.

A digital copy of the chance finding was recently forwarded to the Club by Rob Lakin of the Romsey, Lancefield and Districts Historical Society, in the hope that someone might be able to provide further information.

“Local research for a 150-year book regarding the Lancefield Football Netball Club unearthed references to local boys travelling to Melbourne to see games,” Lakin said.

“We’d be very interested to get more background to the photograph.”

A visiting Englishman to an Australian Rules match in August 1890, known only as ‘J.E.B.’, contributed an essay on the barracker for the newspaper of the day. Of the barracker he wrote in part:

“Barracking is a fine art, so enthralling that once embarked on is never abandoned, once indulged in, never eradicated. ‘Barrack once and you’ll barrack always’.

“It is as intoxicating as the use of opium, and is as entrancing to the exponent and as objectionable to his neighbour as an onion-eater in a theatre. There is no medium between the ‘barracker’ and the moderately excited spectator; you must either ‘barrack’, ‘body and soul’, or watch the game quietly.”