One of the first games of Association football to be played in Australia is said to have taken place in Brisbane in August 1875. It was

between a team of inmates and warders at the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum and a local Australian Rules club. The result appears to be unknown but the organiser is. He was Dr. John Jaap, a doctor, the Surgeon-Supervisor of the hospital, who that day also had also been one of the umpires.

At the time John Jaap was thirty-seven. He had been born in 1839 and arrived in Australia in 1870 with his wife, the former Jane Fowles. She was his second wife. They had married in London in 1869, he recorded as from Sheerness in Kent. But he was not from the Isle of Sheppey and nor, whilst they too had married in London back in 1861, had been his first wife, although they would have three children, all Kent-born and she would also die there, in 1867, aged just twenty-seven. And it is this first wife who provides the link to the origins of the man. She had been born Maria Maclurkin in Blythswood in Glasgow. And they may well have met there, or in Edinburgh, where he had studied as well as London, matriculating in 1859, or perhaps in Paisley, where he would become House Surgeon at the Infirmary.

Indeed, Paisley was his home-town, the son of a Kilmarnock-born shoe-maker, his mother hailing from Neilston. And the family was clearly well-to-do, staying on the High St. where the father had a work-shop where he employed ten and was well-thought-of, he serving as a town-councillor.

On arrival in Australia Jaap, his three existing children remaining in the UK to return to Scotland and be boarded out in Selkirk, first became Surgeon-Supervisor at Brisbane Hospital until appointment in 1872 to the Asylum. And there he seems to have introduced a regime of "improving " activities, part of which was sport including football and from as early as 1873. But here Australian sources fall into a trap. Jaap with his new wife had arrived three years earlier, he already aged thirty-one with the somewhat slim possibility that he might in Scotland or perhaps more likely England have played an embryonic form of the game, one where feet and equally hands could have been used, but it being borne in mind that both rugby and association football did not reach Scotland until 1871. It must therefore be concluded on several counts that the football in the 1873 game was unlikely to have been the Association variant.

But sources seem adamant that there 1875 game was different, and another played the following year still at the asylum might have been too. And there might be a reason for the certainty, one again not appreciated by local sources. In April 1875 it appears John Jaap and his wife returned from a trip, which may well have been back to the UK. It would fit with the normally-contacted, ex-patriot trip home every four years. And this time, whilst the good doctor at now thirty-six would himself have been extremely unlikely to have taken to the field he was arriving as Association football in Scotland, particularly in the West of Sotland, was exploding in popularity. He could not have not noticed. He may even have brought equipment and rules back with him and might have gone on to be far more influential in the Australian introduction to the "beautiful game" but for one fact. In 1877 at the age of just thirty-nine Dr. John Jaap, once of Paisley, then of Brisbane, died. His death was recorded in both places. He is buried in Toowong aka Brisbane General Cemetery.

(With grateful thanks to Ian Syson and his book "The Game That Never Happened)