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Mines Rovers Football Club is an Australian rules football team playing in the the Goldfields Football League is an league based in the Goldfields region of Western Australia. Founded in 1898 as Mines Rovers Football Club, the club has enjoyed a long standing involvement within in the league. One of the first clubs to play Australian football formed within the region, and helped popularise the sport in the region, helping to establish the sport and supplant Rugby in popularity. The GFL was known as the Goldfields Football Association (GFA) from 1901–07 and 1920–25, and as the Goldfields National Football League (GNFL) from 1926–87.

History
Mines Rovers, with forty-three senior grade flags, is the most successful club in the history of the Goldfields Football League. Moreover, its player lists, particularly over the first half of the twentieth century, read almost like a ‘Who’s Who’ of Australian football.

Formed at a meeting at Powell’s Hotel, Kalgoorlie, on Thursday 30th March 1899, the club was originally known simply as ‘Mines’, and boasted the colours of black and white. It proved successful almost from the start, winning the inaugural Goldfields Football Association premiership in 1900, when it may well have benefited from the temporary absence from the competition of reigning premier Boulder City. The overall strength of the team, as well as of goldfields football in general, was readily exemplified during its premiership year when it lost a challenge match against a combined Western Australian Football Association side by just a single point.

If the heyday of prosperity on the goldfields was the early to mid 1890s, there was still sufficient money floating around during the initial decade of the twentieth century to make the region extremely attractive to large numbers of itinerants, including many who boasted considerable skill at what was rapidly emerging as the national game - football. With players of the calibre of William ‘Nipper’ Truscott, Nicky Gilbert, Ralph Robertson, Jack Woollard, Tommy Ellis and Bill Mayman (all Mines), Phil Matson, Hugh Gavin and Alec Robinson (Boulder City), and Jack Diprose, Joe O’Dea and Jack ‘Snowy’ Jarvis (Railways) adorning its competition there can be little doubt that the football being played on the goldfields at this time was the equal of that on display almost anywhere. That this fact was widely recognised at the time is shown, for example, by the inclusion of goldfields footballers in Western Australian state teams. When Western Australia embarked on its first ever interstate tour in 1904 the touring party contained seven players from GFA clubs, including the Mines Rovers trio of Ernie Nelson, who was close to best afield in the match against the VFL, Tommy Ellis and Nick Gilbert. (Defender Albert Patterson, once described by Ted Rowell as “almost unbeatable”, was also selected to tour, but was unable to make the trip.) When interstate carnivals commenced in Melbourne 1908 the GFA, which at the time was a member in its own right of the Australasian Football Council, provided fifty per cent of the West Australian team, and continued to provide a large proportion of the state’s representatives at each of the first three championship series.

The high status of goldfields football was further emphasised with the involvement of its premiership teams in regular state premiership contests against their coastal league counterparts. Mines Rovers participated in such matches on three occasions, but the nearest the team came to success was in 1906 when it held East Fremantle to a draw on Fremantle Oval before succumbing by 19 points in the replay. Dolph Heinrichs wrote of the drawn game:"They (Mines Rovers) were, I believe, a better side than Easts in every position except the ruck. Their ruckman, Polglaise, stood fully at 6ft. 3in. (191cm), and was hailed as a specialist at the hit-in, but throughout the match, although well shepherded, he hardly got his hands on the ball against the terrific leap and pace of East Fremantle’s great follower (‘Dolly’ Christy). The match was one of the fastest and most open ever played on the Oval, with the lead alternating every few minutes, and the result, a draw, was a fitting end to a really great match. The visitors were loud in their praise of this great follower’s exhibition, without which we must have been beaten by some goals."One of the real characters of early goldfields football was Walter Smith, popularly known as ‘the Poet’. Smith, who always took to the field wearing a hat of some description, made his senior GFA debut for Mines in 1906, and later that year established a competition record which still stands when he personally amassed 20 of his team’s 25 goals in a match against Boulder Stars. ‘The Poet’ later moved to Railways and ended his career, after world war one, with a couple of seasons in the WAFL with East Fremantle.

If Smith was perhaps the most eccentric member of Mines Rovers’ early teams one would be somewhat harder pressed deciding on who was the best, but undoubtedly one of the strongest candidates would have to be ‘Nipper’ Truscott, who but for the economic imperative which drove his parents to traverse the country from Lithgow in New South Wales to Kalgoorlie might never have even played Australian football. As it was, he was distinctly unimpressed when he first witnessed it being played, but after giving it a try for himself, soon grew to love it. After playing junior football for a couple of years he wanted to line up with GFA side Trafalgar but his father, a keen Mines supporter, would not hear of it. Truscott ended up travelling to the coast with the Mines Rovers premiership team at the end of the 1906 season, where it was intended that he make his debut for the club in the drawn state premiership clash referred to above; however, an ankle injury prevented him from fronting up. From the following season, though, he was an automatic selection for the side in the centre, of whom Dolph Heinrichs later wrote, he “played the game as it should be played; with skill, and with scrupulous fairness, and I doubt if during the whole of his football career he gave away as many as a dozen free kicks”. Truscott represented Western Australia at the 1908 and 1911 carnivals, and was the first ever Mines Rovers player to win a league fairest and best award, but he would not manage to play in a premiership team until after his move to East Fremantle in 1913.

Dan Scullin was the most celebrated of three brothers to play senior football for Mines Rovers prior to the first world war. Tall, athletic and a superb kick, he was a key reason for the team’s re-emergence as a power, culminating in its first premiership for eight years in 1914. That same year, Scullin travelled to Sydney as a member of Western Australia’s carnival team, and but for the intervention of war there is no telling what he might ultimately have achieved. As it was, all three Scullin brothers signed up to travel abroad in the service of ‘King and country’, and none returned home to Australia.

The GFL suspended operations in 1916 and 1917, and when it resumed Mines Rovers, which had won successive premierships in 1914-15, effectively made it three in a row in what was a prelude to one of the club’s greatest ever eras, the 1920s. The Mines Rovers team which won the 1921-2-3 flags was one of the finest to don the club’s colours, albeit that it was a team of few stars. Indeed, of all the GFL’s teams, it is arguable that the Diorites have been the most consistent embodiment of the ‘all for one, one for all’ team ethic which is so pivotal to Australian football.

The 1920s witnessed something of a decline in the overall standard of goldfields football, though nothing like as pronounced a deterioration as would occur after the second world war. In the 1930s, however, the economic climate changed dramatically, and while the change was mostly for the worse, in certain regions of the country, notably mining communities such as Broken Hill and Kalgoorlie, there remained almost enough jobs to go ‘round, which as far as the football competitions in those communities were concerned, was good news. Suddenly, as far as the ambitious and talented goldfields footballer was concerned, Perth and Melbourne were no longer necessarily perceived as having ‘streets lined with gold’, a perception which Mines player Jacko Osmetti elucidated thus:"One year Marinko wanted me to go down to Perth with him. He could get a job in the electric light station or something like that for four pounds a week. I said, “I’m getting three and I’m sure of mine, going down I’m not sure of it.” So I didn’t go with him."Osmetti later turned down a similar invitation from another Boulder City player, ‘Blue’ Richards, and for much of the 1930s this kind of attitude was increasingly prevalent. One obvious consequence of this was that goldfields teams once again became highly competitive. In 1931, for instance, Mines Rovers defeated a strong South Fremantle line-up by six points, while later in the decade GNFL representative teams overcame strong club sides such as Claremont and Port Adelaide, and even proximate West Australian and South Australian state combinations.

Another consequence was that the GNFL and its clubs suddenly found themselves in a position of some strength when it came to attracting top-line talent to the goldfields, effectively reversing, albeit admittedly only to a modest extent, the ‘player drain’ that, over the previous couple of decades, had gone from being a trickle to a torrent. In 1934, for example, Mines Rovers appointed the club’s first ever paid coach in the shape of Wally Fletcher, a former East Perth stalwart who had played 171 league games between 1919 and 1931, including the winning grand finals of 1919, 1920, 1923 and 1926. The appointment was a resounding success as Fletcher promptly steered the side to its first flag since 1926, paving the way for its outright dominance of the competition during the second half of the 1930s, which was simultaneously something of a halcyon era for goldfields football as a whole. With players such as the immensely versatile Alan Forrest, Harry Carrington, Whyburn Taylor (ex-East Fremantle), former Subiaco Sandover Medallist and VFL player Lou Daily, the Osmetti brothers (Jack, Charlie and Cyril), Tony Tomich and Jack ‘Carp’ Reilly (ex-South Fremantle) to the fore, Mines played off for seven flags in succession between 1934 and 1940, winning 5 of them. The club also provided three of the Dillon Medallists during that period [8] in Taylor (1936), Tomich (1938) and Daily (1939), while Charlie Osmetti (1936 - 68 goals), Ray Johns (1939 - 62) and Alan Forrest (1940 - 74) topped the league’s goal kicking list.

During the post-war period, as the profile of the GNFL gradually declined, Mines Rovers continued to enjoy regular premiership success, including three in a row from 1955-7, and a league record equalling four in succession between 1967 and 1970. After scoring a 45 point grand final win over Railways in 1972, however, the club was forced to endure an unprecedented two decade long premiership drought. Since rediscovering the winning formula in 1991, however, the Diorites have been the GFL’s most successful club, with their forty-second flag coming via a 19.9 (123) to 9.5 (59) grand final defeat of Railways in 2015. Since then they have finished runners-up to Boulder City in 2016 and to Railways in 2017 before cruising to their forty-third premiership success in 2018 on the strength of a 21.5 (131) to 7.5 (47) grand final trouncing of Boulder City.

A century ago, goldfields football was at the forefront of the game, and while this is clearly no longer the case, as long as clubs such as Mines Rovers endure there will be meaningful and tangible reminders of those times, as well as living evocations of the unique and admirable traditions concocted out of more than a hundred years of passion, energy and selfless commitment.

Grand Final Appearances
The list of grand final appearance including premiership teams and runners-up is detailed below.

Notable players

 * John Woollard (Mines Rovers/Kalgoorlie City) – Port Adelaide captain 1910.
 * Lou Daily (Mines Rovers) – 1935 Sandover Medalist for Subiaco.
 * Alec Epis (Mines Rovers) – premiership player for.
 * Jaymie Graham (Mines Rovers) – played for.
 * Tom Outridge (Mines Rovers) – inaugural winner of the Sandover Medal in 1921.
 * "Nipper" Truscott (Mines Rovers) – inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.
 * Eddie Betts (Mines Rovers) – 's leading goalkicker 2010 and 2012.
 * Dom Sheed (Mines Rovers) - 2018 West Coast premiership player.