With its wind-swept concourse, tangled web of office high-rises and all those artless chunks of concrete and steel, the approach to Etihad stadium doesn’t offer much for the romantically inclined football fan, at least not on first sight. But if you wind around right to gate four and climb a few flights of stairs, you’ll reach a cavernous room in which you’re enveloped by the history of Fitzroy Football Club, the AFL team who ceased to exist 20 years ago this week. If you’re lucky, you’ll arrive on a day when Arthur Wilson is there to greet you.

Arthur is the chairman of the Fitzroy-Brisbane Lions historical society and the curator of its magnificent museum-cum-shrine, whose contents would be spread far and wide or else destroyed were it not for his bowerbird instincts and love for his football club.

In 2010, Fitzroy’s treasures finally settled in this spacious and lovingly-constructed home but not before the best part of two nomadic decades in and out of storage and temporary displays. That, it has to be said, is just the Fitzroy way. When stadium boss Ian Collins saw the lengths to which Wilson had gone in order to preserve the sacred artefacts of this once-great club, he didn’t hesitate in handing over the keys. “I nearly fell over,” a grateful Arthur Wilson tells me.

Fitzroy-Brisbane Lions football club Hall of Fame inductee Arthur Wilson at the Fitzroy-Brisbane Lions historical society museum, Etihad Stadium, Melbourne. Photograph: Darren Pocock Photography/Courtesy of the Brisbane Lions football club

More than any person in clubland, Arthur can lay claim to having seen it all. In 1944, when Fitzroy won its final league premiership as a standalone club, he ran out onto the Junction Oval on grand final day as the team’s mascot. When he was too young to walk, his parents would close the family bicycle shop in Carlton, stick their son in his pram and wheel him down to games at the club’s former home at Brunswick Street Oval.

Now, 83 years on – and 20 years since their heartbreaking last game and subsequent merger with the Brisbane Bears – Arthur’s love for Fitzroy is undimmed. In his time he’s also filled just about every other role the Lions had on offer bar player or coach, from helming the club’s junior programs of the 1960s and managing the senior side, to a lengthy stint as secretary and years as Fitzroy’s head recruiter, an endeavour that reaped some of the club’s greatest heroes.

Fitzroy’s 333-game champion and 1969 Brownlow medalist Kevin Murray models an earlier incarnation of the Lions’ jumper. Photograph: Getty Images

This year, to the surprise of nobody who knows of his efforts in keeping the spirit of the Roy Boys alive, the Brisbane Lions inducted Arthur into its Hall of Fame. Club legend John Murphy draped the award over his head and Jonathan Brown interviewed him afterwards. He was suitably chuffed.

“It was certainly a surprise and felt an honour,” he tells me. Better still, his elevation came on the same night as that of George Coates, former Roys player, designer of the club’s prowling lion logo and Arthur’s good mate. The pair formed a post-merger committee which ensured the newly-formed entity would appropriately honour the heritage and traditions of Fitzroy, one of the most successful clubs of the league’s foundation years.

“The Brisbane Lions have been terrific,” Wilson tells me, but I wonder whether it still feels like it did during the old days at the Junction, and whether someone who cherished something so dearly and for so long could fully embrace the re-birth of a club that was allowed to die with so little dignity. The first time we chatted, he’d described Fitzroy’s final days as “bloody awful.”

“Yes, it feels like the old days but it’s not the same mate, it’s not Fitzroy,” he admits, though not with bitterness. “That’s obvious. When you’ve had 113 years of a club... My first introduction when I was about three and my parents took me down in the pusher. So having 80-odd years supporting them, you know, there’s a hell of a lot of good memories.”

“It wasn’t surprising when it did happen, but it was disappointing of course. It’s pretty heartbreaking to think that a foundation member of the VFL – 113 years in the competition, we won eight premierships and had six Brownlow medalists, so we had a pretty good history in the AFL. So that was very disappointing. At the end of the day it was out of our hands.”

But Wilson and Coates were at least on hand to make sure the transition wasn’t as rough on Fitzroy loyalists as it might have been, successfully lobbying Brisbane management to retain key symbols of Fitzroy’s history and curry favour with what remained of the Melbourne-based supporters. Thus an agreement was struck to keep the Lions’ moniker, the team song and the Coates’s lion design on the team jumper. “Once they agreed with that,” Wilson says, “as far as I was concerned, that was enough for me to say ‘OK, well I’m going to be around.’”

A 1944 Fitzroy football club premiership photo on display at the Fitzroy-Brisbane Lions historical society museum, Etihad Stadium, Melbourne. Photograph: Darren Pocock Photography/Courtesy of the Brisbane Lions football club

For others the grieving and adjustment process wasn’t so simple. For six months after the merger another Lions diehard and tireless volunteer, Peta Phillips, had to drive past Brunswick Oval every day on her way to work. Even peripheral vision of the club’s old ground would fill her eyes with tears, she told me. Figuring those feelings would be even harder to bear come winter she resolved to move to Europe but eventually stayed, and like so many of the club’s Melbourne fans, slowly but surely embraced the Brisbane Lions as she had her former club. Now she’s the Victorian sponsor of Lions star Pearce Hanley, and she speaks of him like a son.

Others tried valiantly to hold on to the memories of the late 70s and mid-80s, when the Roys called the Junction Oval home and enjoyed their last run of meaningful team success. No Roys supporter evoked the spirit of the place quite so well as playwright and artist Barry Dickins, who used to sneak into the ground on a forged concession card and await his brother’s arrival from over the fence.

“Everything seemed ad-libbed,” Dickins once wrote, “especially the poverty.” The Junction was where the faithful bore witness to the heroic deeds of Garry Wilson and Bernie Quinlan, whose “long, tireless frame loped along rather like a gazelle with dencorub on.” Quinlan wasn’t the only Roy who moved Dickins to verse. He wrote evocatively about Fitzroy’s endless struggle in newspaper columns, essays and even a play, in which he skewered the league’s heartless quest to dispose of the club.

A Fitzroy fan burns a flag after the club’s last AFL game game in Melbourne, during round 21 of the 1996 season at the MCG. Photograph: Getty Images

Still, Fitzroy’s final game in Melbourne was one of football’s most shameful moments thanks to uncaring administrators. Roys fans howled, burnt flags, and had to watch as their side was thumped by 151 points against Richmond, before invading the arena one last time. Dickins spotted Bernie Quinlan weeping openly for the club, even though only a year earlier they’d callously sacked him as coach. Wrote Dickins: “It was so beautiful to see him cry as he faithfully spoke of something rather like the end of the world.”

And for many Roys fans, it honestly was the end of the world. That last ‘home’ game was a gut-wrenching prelude to the totally avoidable indignity that followed a week later, when despite intimations from the Dockers that they’d be willing to shift the fixture, Fitzroy’s league-mandated funeral against Fremantle took place at Subiaco, as far as one could physically and spiritually be from Brunswick street or the Junction. Like so many times in their dying years the Roys were walloped. 86 points. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

In May of 1996, writing for The Age, Barry Dickins penned “The Rage of a Roy Boy”, a classic among his paeans to Fitzroy, and one that again confirmed him among the most lyrical and idealistic figures of football’s literature:

My father took me to each Fitzroy game at Brunswick Oval. You walked across an old bridge suspended over a depressing briquette yard, and you heard them singing as early as half-way through the Seconds. It was tribal. I used to stare in sheer disbelief as the smartarse Kevin Wright threaded the needle by defying gravity and booting uncanny goals like effort and football had nothing in common.

But there has always been a death-wish deep inside Fitzroy. Like ‘61, the crazy way in which the Fitzroy bowling club and the Fitzroy cricket club voted at the annual general meeting to boot the Fitzroy football club out. Almost out of existence. We became the wandering Jew of football, training where we could. Doing a bit of lucklustre circle-work at forsaken Westgarth Oval... We did it to ourselves. We killed ourselves.

The Rage of a Roy Boy concluded with a rib-rattling shirt-front on league administration:

What has led us to suicide is an insane belief in money and in a society that has no history. When we die and go to heaven the only thing we will take with us is disgrace, because that’s the new name for love, and Fitzroy Football Club. You think that I hate them? I feel deader than they are. Like I’ve wept a weir.

But the Brisbane Lions have turned out better historians than Dickins could have imagined. For one there’s Arthur Wilson’s shrine to Fitzroy FC, through which every new recruit takes a tour to learn about the club’s origins, but Brisbane have also sought to merge the two club’s statistics and awards. They consider Chris Johnson and Alastair Lynch “one club players”. Life members and Hall of Famers from the old club have been bestowed with the same honour at the new one, though not all have adopted the Brisbane Lions as their own. All are welcome regardless.

The last of the Mohicans: Fitzroy’s 1996 players line up before their round six encounter against Richmond at Western Oval, a game they’d lose by 92 points. Photograph: Getty Images

It might not seem a big deal to outsiders, but it’s instructive that Brisbane’s Victorian manager Sam Lord is a former Roys diehard himself and also sits on the club’s historical society. In his main role at the club he succeeded Jeremy Guard, a former Fitzroy player. It is Lord’s job to link Roys fans to the Brisbane Lions and foster not only the spirit of the old club, but something new.

He says that in the years following the merger, three types of Lions fan emerged: the ones who, like himself, jumped straight on board as Brisbane members in 1997, those who adopted a rival AFL club as their own, and the heartbroken romantics who were so disenchanted by the league’s heartless erasure of their side that they abandoned AFL football altogether, either adopting the Fitzroy amateur side who now play at Brunswick street or finding entirely new ways to spend their winter weekends.

Like most clubs, Brisbane’s Melbourne-based membership figures have fluctuated according to on-field success. Two and a half thousand early adopters of 1997 swelled significantly off the back of the triple premiership success of 2001-03, eventually peaking beyond 7,000 – more than Fitzroy usually had in their dying seasons. That number has since settled back in the 4,000 range.

John Barker and his Fitzroy team-mates contemplate a heavy loss in the club’s last AFL game against Fremantle Dockers at Subiaco, 1 September 1996. Photograph: Getty Images

“The (Melbourne) membership has remained quite steady,” Lord says. “It doesn’t have a significant drop because they’re all the rusted-on Fitzroy people. No doubt we’d have more if we were winning but they still stay rusted on.”

The new generation Lions administration respects the wishes of those who refused to come on board with Brisbane. “We know that there’s a lot of old Fitzroy people who have never been and will never be Brisbane Lions fans,” says Lord. “We respect that. After 20 years they’re not going to change their tune and everyone dealt with the emotion differently. But there are still probably a few who are on the fence, which sounds silly after 20 years. If we do the right things, engagement-wise, they might really feel that connection.”

“Brisbane Lions will never be Fitzroy but we’re very careful and very particular in honouring it.”

This has meant, at times, weathering the odd storm of criticism and conceding ground to the club’s Victorian members, for whom the number of Melbourne games and the design of club jumper are constant bug bears. For Melbourne fixtures the club wears the royal blue, red and yellow of Fitzroy’s 1980s pomp, but when Brisbane introduced to the infamous “Paddlepop Lion” guernsey design there was, well, an uproar.

“The jumper is very important,” says Lord, who concedes that it is hard to cater to the individual tastes of every member. Ironically, a tour of the club’s museum would serve as a reminder to them that for the greater bulk of its history – and certainly its greatest success when it still stood alone – Fitzroy was attired in the maroon and navy blue more readily associated with Brisbane. Fitzroy were also known as the Gorillas for that final flag in ‘44 and before that The Maroons.

“If we wear the FFC jumper, generally it brings a better crowd in for games,” says Lord. “It’s fair to say the jumper plays a very important role.”

“Every Fitzroy person dealt with merger differently, has dealt with the post-merger differently and has a different emotional connection with different parts of the club. That’s the beauty of it and that’s the hard part as well, because you can’t tap into everyone’s immediate emotional connection.”

Fitzroy fan flood the playing arena after the club’s last ever game in Melbourne, against Richmond in round 21 of the 1996 AFL season. Photograph: Getty Images

As for the question of Fitzroy’s true ‘home’, Arthur Wilson says that it’s impossible to choose between Brunswick street oval, where he first fell in love with the game, and the Junction oval, where the club had its last genuine era of team success – when “Superboot” Quinlan served as spearhead for a team that won its way to five finals campaigns in eight years and finished a win away from the 1986 grand final.

Yet all the most important visual symbols of the club’s former glory now rest at Etihad stadium, whose corporate sheen provides stark contrast to the rustic delight of Kevin ‘Bulldog’ Murray’s sweat-stained back brace, the No7 locker door featuring the names of Haydn Bunton, Warwick Irwin and Michael Gale, or the pristine corduroy and leather lace-up guernsey from the 1898 season.

None of it would be there without indefatigable Wilson, who absorbed the sadness, anger and frustration of Fitzroy’s demise and made sure the club’s history and the memories of its fans would never be forgotten.

Fitzroy, the football club that heaved its final sobbing breath as the league’s nomadic, unloved vagrant, is now somehow home, its former glory preserved. For Roys fans who lived through the torment of their club’s final throes, life has never been quite the same again. When you speak to Arthur Wilson, you get an idea of why they ever cared so much.