THEY PLAYED their game of football — Mornington v Mordialloc — on the Mordialloc foreshore where the Peter Scullin Reserve is now. The game ended at 5.30pm. Curiously, no one recorded the score. The date was Saturday, May 21, 1892.

The Mornington players then went to the nearby hotel, a derivative of which still stands. There has always been a rumour that alcohol was involved in what happened thereafter, but my guide, John Holmes, says it is contrary to the known evidence. Ten of the 15 players who boarded the yawl for the return trip were teetotallers. The yawl was seen once more, by some fishermen off Frankston. The fishermen heard singing across the water.

Holmes is the son of a Sydney wharfie who lives in Frankston. He is a former trainer of horses, worked for Tommy Smith, and was also a fireman. A couple of months ago, when I spoke at Moyston about Tom Wills, he emerged from the crowd and said he had another story as big as Tom Wills. Last Saturday, he appeared at the panel I chaired on sport and human rights with a small dossier on what he calls "the football team disaster of 1892".

In the dossier, I read two curious facts. One is that the captain of the yawl got seasick on the trip across the bay from Mornington on the morning of the game. He then had what was described as "a presentiment of danger" and went home by train instead. The other is that one of the players, who supplied music for the trip on his cornet, was heard to play The Boat That Never Returned as the yawl pulled away from the pier. Some people say that's a song about the Titanic, but the song was written half a century before the Titanic sinking.

Some people say only one body was ever found. Only one body was found with the upturned boat, that of Alfred Lawrence, 19. On June 9, the body of 14-year-old Charles Hooper washed up at Rosebud. In the words of the fisherman who found the body: "It was very much decomposed, the whole of it beneath the hips being gone." Another body, also much decomposed, was found at Mount Eliza.

Holmes gives me a guided tour of the region. He shows me the Frankston home of Lord Stanley Bruce. Before the last federal election when the same fate befell John Howard, Bruce was the only sitting Australian Prime Minister to have lost his seat. His house would have been something in its day, with no other houses around it and a clear view of the bay. My guide also takes me to the handsome front gates of the house where Joan Lindsay lived, the author of Picnic At Hanging Rock, another Australian story of disappearance.

Holmes takes me to his home and I see his study which is crammed with valuable books on Australian sport. He recently swapped an original copy of an account of the expedition to find the lost explorers Burke and Wills for a first edition of H.C.A. Harrison's The Story of an Athlete. H.C.A. Harrison was the first cousin to Tom Wills and a key figure in footy's history wars. Holmes also has a catalogue he keeps on Australian sportsmen. His passion is travelling Australia visiting memorials. Mostly sporting memorials.

On the wall of his study is a magnificent photo of one of his best mates, South Sydney full-back Clive Churchill, after whom the National Rugby League equivalent of the AFL's Norm Smith medal is named. He also has an original of Churchill's ghosted biography.

Holmes takes me to the monument on the Mornington foreshore erected by the local community to commemorate the 15 young men who drowned coming home from a game of football. Mornington had 900 people then.

In an excellent 1992 lecture, historian Noel Taylor pointed out that 47 per cent of the people who died in Melbourne in 1891 were aged five years or under. These young men were the future of Mornington. It was said the town changed name after the accident and became known as Mourningtown.

Anxiety began to set in when the boat had not arrived in Mornington by 9.30pm. When the alarm was sounded word could not be got out because the telegraph stations closed at 10pm. The Mornington telegraph station still stands. The response of the local community, led by a constable of police, has been described as excellent. A search was organised while the families stood about on Mornington pier. They knew the news was bad early the following morning when they saw a fishing boat, called the Wanderer, sailing towards them with her flag at half-mast.

Three of the young men who drowned were the sons of the local Presbyterian vicar, the Reverend James Caldwell. It being Sunday, he tried to perform his duty and preach. He departed weeping, unable to speak. A widower, the Reverend Caldwell spent the rest of the day walking the beach. Holmes shows me the Presbyterian church, now part of a restaurant.

We drive around and he shows me the house where the vicar lived. It's a stately 19th-century home. Then he takes me to an even grander red-brick house where another team member and a friend of the vicar's three sons lived. It's notable that the Mornington team had no distinction of class. Among those lost were a medical student, an architecture student, a blacksmith, a fisherman, an apprentice wheelwright. My companion points to a small balcony with a lattice metal rail on the second floor. "That's where they would have looked out for their son from," he says.

Holmes hasn't been to the Mornington cemetery to visit the graves of the three bodies that were recovered, but he's going. "I'll tell them we're still thinking of them," he says.

Holmes believes "the football team disaster of 1892" is part of Australian sporting history.

Having spent a few hours down there with him, having walked around the various places where the story is still present, I can tell you it's a big story all right.