Download and listen to episode 1 here.
With Ian and Paul being novice radio presenters, the first episode of If You Know Your History on Football Nation Radio was guided by George Donikian. After a brief introduction of the background of the show's hosts, the show's premise is put forward - to talk about the hidden history of soccer in Australia; to talk about soccer's ordinariness in Australia - that it has been a normal part of life in Australia for a very long time; but also to explore the extraordinariness of Australia - the stresses and travails it has had to endure as a sport and cultural product; to explore the cultural embeddedness of the game, or its lack of cultural embeddedness. The way that the game forgets both recent and old histories, and soon forgets them again.
We discuss the limitations of analysing Australian soccer solely through the lens of migration, especially continental European migration; that a fixation with such an analysis obscures the histories of soccer as it existed before the arrival of those migrants, as well as obscuring the histories of regions where soccer had become culturally entrenched, or of groups who had to overcome or exist outside the cultural dominance of those kinds of migrants in Australian soccer.
We move on to one of the 'problems' of research into soccer and football in Australia - the assumption that soccer was the only game which used a round-ball, when in certain eras different football codes also used round balls. But Paul also opines on the manifesto he came across a few years previously of 'keeping local histories, local' - the idea that local people are more often than not the best equipped to preserve and display their history, as opposed to historians from remote/centralised institutions; that as valuable as it has to have centralised historical expertise, it is even better to be able to find ways to increase the skill level of amateur historians across the board.
(for brief further insight into this idea, see Paul's summary of the keynote speech at the 2012 Worlds of Football conference, made by Kevin Moore, who was then Director of England's National Football Museum)
After the break, there is a discussion on what to call the game - should it be 'football' or 'soccer'? Ian makes the argument for the use of the term 'soccer' for the purposes of clarity - there are many football codes in Australia, and linguistically flattening the term 'football' to inherently mean 'soccer' would create an ongoing issue of clarification of terms.
George then digresses into a brief anecdote on the changes of the names of the different football codes in his own career as a newsreader.
(see also an old piece from Ian from 2012 which creates the framework for merely using the word 'football' doesn't necessarily work, and that the ideological push by some people involved with soccer to commandeer 'football' as the name of the game is based on some ahistorical ideas; sadly, the Martin Flanagan article, about whoever owns the term football subsequently owning the future, quoted by soccer people in several places, seems to no longer be available online).
Paul's opinion on the matter is that there has also been a deliberate campaign of shame directed at the term 'soccer' both from outside the game, but also from people within the game, and that this latter source of historical revisionism also seeks to flatten the experience of the game when it was known predominantly in English as 'soccer'. But also that the other football codes have divested themselves to a degree of the term football, using names such as 'AFL' or 'NRL' as the de facto name of the sport, especially in new markets.
(see also Joe Gorman explanation for why he used the word 'soccer' in his book The Death and Life of Ausrtralian Soccer: "I use the word “soccer” deliberately. Of all the things this book seeks to do, understanding the past is the most important. The lexical shift from soccer to football that occurred in 2004 might have brought us in line with the rest of the world, but it betrays our own history. (2017, p. 6)
One of the key points is that the the name 'football' belongs to the code which has won in its respective territory - Ian says 'it is the name you get for winning the local battle', while Paul adds that 'football... is a loaded term embedded within a culture'.
Then follows first appearance of the 100 Years Ago Today segment, and a game played between Maitland and Newcastle representative teams; the relaxed nature of the game in the region, and the 'obviousness' for local labour organisations using soccer as part of their recreation activities; acknowledging, however obliquely, that even though this episode was broadcast on Remembrance Day, on the same date a hundred years earlier the news of the Armistice being signed would not have been known yet in Australia.
Then a brief digression into the idea of digital narrowness - that modern digitally focused research amplifies the possibility that researchers would find only the material they are looking for, and missing out on the social context the game existed in. Also a discussion on the problem of archival newspapers using pseudonymous writers.
We finally get into a discussion about Australian soccer and World War 1. Includes talk of: Irymple; The Soccer Ashes, still missing for decades; the cost of war to Australian soccer proportionally; the idea that soccer may not feel like it is Australian enough to participate in the modern pageantry and co-option of World War 1 commemoration by other football codes; the discomfort some may feel about trying to venerate the connections between sport and war.
No comments:
Post a Comment