30 April 2020
This graph helps answer the question - what did people call football back then?
I've used 1860-1879 as the sample period and all searches included "football" and "rules" within 5 words of each other. Search results gave these counts in Trove:
australian rules 3
aussie rules 0
rugby rules 39
union rules 15
victorian rules 16
melbourne rules 21
south australian rules 0
adelaide rules 11
association rules 18
eton rules 4