Carlton star on the canvas

by PAUL DAFFEY

Former Carlton player Frank Munro recently did the Blues a fine favour when he handed over this previously unknown painting to the club's history custodian Tony De Bolfo.

The painting, Balharry Comes Through, is more than a century old. It depicts well-groomed ruckman HW Balharry stepping through two Essendon opponents. According to the Carlton website, the player receiving a palm in the face might be the renowned Albert Thurgood, a winner of one of those awards that really should make a comeback: Champion of the Colony.

Balharry played for Carlton between 1893 and 1896, when he was a member of the Blues' last VFA team. (Carlton was a founding member of the VFL in 1897).

The painting is by an unknown artist.

Munro, who played 14 games for the Blues in the mid-1950s, told De Bolfo during the changeover in North Carlton's Brandon Hotel that the painting once hung on the wall of a pub that was run by Balharry. In the early 1960s, when houses in Station Street, North Carlton, were being demolished to make way for housing commission flats, a resident of one of the houses gave the painting to Munro's father Jim because of the family's Carlton connection.

Frank Munro, who is 73, travelled from Traralgon to donate the painting. Despite claim to a glorious history, Carlton has no museum in which to hang the portrait of its dashing former follower.

This story first appeared in The Age.

18 September 2007

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