Fifteen Young Men

Book excerpt: Fifteen Young Men is the true story of a doomed adventure. Few people know an Australian football team drowned in 1892. Yet the boat disaster still ranks alongside the Manchester United plane crash (1958) as one of the world's greatest sporting tragedies. Lost were fifteen men and boys from one town - brothers, fathers, sons, uncles and best mates - 'youths that might have made the best colonists Australia ever had.' Only one or two members of the team were spared: the captain, who at the jetty had a strange sense of impending danger, and gave away his ticket before the voyage, and one other. For the first time in 122 years, journalist Paul Kennedy reveals why the Mornington Football Club never made it home. In doing so, he brings to life nineteenth-century Australia during depression and its first banking crisis, a period of trauma, resilience, friendship, love and grief for a generation of settlers' children.