formed from the boughs of two trees, and; the epic "cross-country game", which lasted the whole of a Sunday (after mass) and was won by taking the ball across a parish boundary. "Wrestling", "holding" opposing players, and carrying the ball were all allowed. Accounts from the Irish diaspora Some accounts of traditional Irish football come not from Ireland, but from the Irish diaspora, often in celebrating traditional events such as St Patrick's Day. The largest such communities existed in Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Many of the earliest football matches in Australia date back to the 1840s were Irish immigrants. In the Colony of South Australia there are several accounts of Irish football being played at Thebarton in 1843 and again in 1853. There were similar accounts of football in the 1840s in the Colony of Victoria including Melbourne at Batman's Hill and the goldfields in the Colony of Victoria. The account of H C A Harrison, one of the seminal in the history of Victorian football, of Irish rules was that it gave players "the full ability to kick anybody that came within reach". Shin-kicking (or hacking) was a major feature of traditional Irish football and also one of the main reasons why it failed to be widely adopted in Australia. Irish football was also played in the Colony of New Zealand in the 1860s and 1870s in Auckland during Thomas Croke's term as Archbishop there. An 1882 theatrical performance in New York portrays a controversial Irish football match on Saint Nicholas Day 6 December 1790 at the school of Champs de Mars in Paris. Despite a large Irish population references to it being played in America prior to the 1880s are scant. USGAA makes the unsourced claim that matches were played at Hyde Park, San Francisco in the 1850s. First appearance of modern football During the 1860s and 1870s, rugby football started to become popular in Ireland. Trinity College Dublin was an early stronghold of rugby, and the rules of the (English) Football Association were codified in 1863 and distributed widely. By this time, according to Gaelic football historian Jack Mahon, even in the Irish countryside, caid had begun to give way to a "rough-and-tumble game", which even allowed tripping. The first account of what the founders of modern Gaelic football referred to as Irish football date to 1873. Paddy Begley notes that in County