Dick Mullaly
Australian rules footballer (1892–1971)

Richard Thomas Mullaly (19 June 1892 – 11 June 1971) was an Australian rules footballer who played with South Melbourne in the Victorian Football League (VFL).
Family
The son of William Patrick Mullaly (-1936), and Emma Mullaly, née Dillon, he was born on 19 June 1892. He married Gertrude Sarah Black (1893-1919) in 1916. They had a daughter, Catherine Marie (1918-).
He married, for a second time, on 28 November 1925. His second wife was Anne Elizabeth Finn (1900-1990). Their son, Paul Richard Mullaly, Q.C., B.A., LL.B,. Dip.Theol., was a judge of the Victorian County Court from 1979 to 2001.
Football
Recruited locally from Leopold, Mullaly played mainly as a centreman during his time at South Melbourne. He participated in South Melbourne's 1912 and 1914 VFL Grand Final losses.
The public source identifies “Dick Mullaly” as australian rules footballer (1892–1971). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Dick, Mullaly and Australian.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Dick Mullaly”, the useful work is to connect “australian rules footballer (1892–1971)” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 29, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q5273214. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892, 1971, 1936 and 1893.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dick Mullaly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.