Episode 28 - Bonita Mersiades; Fairfax Media photo collection; Soccer in the Communist press

Download and listen to episode 28 here.

We begin the show by noting Mark Boric and Greg Werner's efforts in getting 1980s editions of Australian Soccer Weekly uploaded on to Mark's site.

We then move to an expansion of the discussion from the previous week on record keeping, noting the failures of both clubs and governing bodies in taking basic record keeping seriously.

Paul discusses the overlooked (by everyone, including himself) 20th anniversary of South Melbourne's win in the inaugural Oceania Club Championships, which were held in Fiji. This segment includes some chat on the tournament itself, a classic Soccer Australia administrative error, but also a recently uploaded Greek language audio recording of the tournament final, as broadcast by Melbourne based Greek-Australian radio station 1422AM 3XY Radio Hellas.

Then Paul promised to get up a website for the show, with a lightly annotated episode guide, in about two weeks. Would he be able to follow through?

Then a brief chat about the 'Acraman game'. a game of some kind of football played in South Australia in 1854.

We chat to Bonita Mersiades, to discuss the acquisition that collective effort by a range of organisations and individuals has secured the purchase of Fairfax Media's photographic collection - including some 19,000 soccer photos. Bonita takes us through the process of becoming aware of the collection being up for sale; the history of the collection itself; the FBI indictment involved in an earlier change of ownership of the collection; the range of photos in the collection, and how much it does or does not crossover with photos in the Schwab and Shorrock collection at Deakin University; the copyright status of photos in the collection; and the eventual plan for housing and displaying photos from this collection.

The show concludes with a lengthy discussion on the coverage of soccer in Tribune, the official newspaper of the long defunct* Communist Party of Australia.

Among other things, we talk about Tribune's political motivations in covering Australian soccer; the familiarity of its writers with both the game of soccer, and Australian soccer's internal politics; Frank Hardy making comment on the game's prospects in Australia compared to the 'traditional' football codes, including digression into a discussion on cultural nationalism; the newspaper's interest in tours from teams from the Soviet bloc; the focus (in Melbourne) on singling out the Croatian community for purported links to the Ustashe movement; the newspaper's decline in covering soccer, alongside thew newspaper's own decline;

The discussion also covers the newspaper's extensive photographic collection, which like the rest of the relevant material exists outside of copyright (we speculate as to why, without touching on the proximity of the SEARCH Foundation, which is reputedly the trustee for the archives of the CPA and associated parties since the CPA's early 1990s dissolution). It should also be noted that the archived material from Tribune spans only from the 1930s to the 1970s, even though the newspaper existed both before and after those dates.

(*it should be noted that the organisational history of the Communist Party of Australia, especially claimant successor organisations, as well as the history of Tribune itself after the mid-1970s, is a very complicated affair - so if we muck up some of the history, we should be forgiven)