Episode 35 - Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) database; demise of AAP

Download and listen to episode 35 here.

On this week's episode, Paul is joined in hosting duties by George Cotsanis, who's filling in for Ian Syson who's suffering from vertigo. We start off with catching up with what George has been keeping busy with, which includes a scrapbook from an old club coming soon, and a newly sourced (and re-found) team photo of the short-lived Victorian club Footscray Capri. George also has some Betamax tapes from Gary Cole's collection, but he needs a working Betamax machine to see what's on them - can any of our listeners help?

We then move on to the news of the day, which is the imminent demise of Australian Associated Press. While noting the devastating impact AAP's closure will have on the quality and breadth of news coverage in Australia - and on the journalists who will lose their livelihoods - Paul, George and the show's producer Josh Parish focus on what the possible effects will be for Australian soccer coverage, including the future historical archive.

This includes the impacts on coverage of national level soccer in smaller media markets like Tasmania; Vince Rugari's and Mike Tuckerman's points that coverage of small, low interest games like Mariners vs Phoenix in Gosford might disappear; Josh's note that even the online dedicated soccer press, like SBS' The World Game, also rely heavily on AAP content, and that AAP writers are often the only people attending press conferences.

Paul goes on to note that even if the soccer specific press fills in the gap left by the demise of AAP, the deficiencies of being soccer specific sites means that the game will lose a connection to mainstream sporting news coverage, even if that coverage was already marginal. On top of that, there's the still the issue of print primacy when it comes to archives - websites and web pages are still liable to disappear without a trace, taking with them the public record in a way that the demise of print news does not.

We also look at the parallels in historic lapses of coverage, reportage, and record keeping in Australian soccer. There's also the observation by Les Street that AAP reports made up a huge chunk of National Soccer League reporting, especially in the 1990s and 2000 once papers like Soccer Action ceased running. (Greg Werner also wonders what will happen to AAP's photographic archive.)

We finish off the opening segment of the episode by quickly looking at Mark Boric's latest update, wherein he foresees a likely end to his frantic mass scanning sessions, unless there's a major donation or find.

Our main topic for this week is Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) database, and the soccer references contained within. In its own words, the AustLII database:

provides free internet access to Australasian legal materials. AustLII's broad public policy agenda is to improve access to justice through better access to information. To that end, we have become one of the largest sources of legal materials on the net, with over four million searchable documents. 

AustLII publishes public legal information -- that is, primary legal materials (legislation, treaties and decisions of courts and tribunals); and secondary legal materials created by public bodies for purposes of public access (law reform and royal commission reports for example) and a substantial collection of law journals.

We look at the wide range of legal genres that AustLII covers, among them:

• ombudsman reports
• visa and migration tribunals
• judgements from criminal courts and civil proceedings
• town planning and local government regulations
• industrial relations tribunals
• liquor licencing
• discrimination hearings 
• government gazettes

All these genres (and the many others besides) when looked at with a soccer lens show us a different side of the game apart from the goals and glory that is the primary interest of so many. It shows up the administrative side of the game, and the ways in which Australian soccer is connected to crucial elements of Australian life via its interactions with the legal system. Foreign players on visas - and the clubs that have hired them - find things go wrong.

There's ombudsman's reports into the chaotic political party and ethnic factional machinations of local councillors, and the ways in which soccer clubs trying to get access to grounds (and funding) were intimately connected to those shenanigans.

Perhaps most curiously, you have likely non-soccer followers making judgements on the relative merits of Australian soccer and Australian clubs, in terms of national and international prestige. For example, one arbiter of justice had this to say about long defunct Tasmanian club Hobart Azzurri:

Hobart City Azzuri Soccer Club is not a national soccer club (such as, for example, the "Socceroos"). Nor is it a national soccer organisation (such as the "Australian Soccer Federation"). Whilst it may be possible for a local soccer club to have a "national reputation" I do not think on the evidence before me, that Hobart City Azzuri Soccer Club enjoys such a reputation.

There are also documents from court proceedings from clubs taking on their respective federations, the kind of thing which is crucial to understanding the history of soccer in Australia. In short, the AustLII database is a wonderful and probably under-utilised resource in terms of researching Australian soccer history.

In our final segment, Ian calls in from home to do his 100 Years Ago Today segment. He looks at the ongoing preparations for the oncoming 1920 season in Newcastle,  ads for football boots in Queensland, and the simmering tension of the club vs district debate. Elsewhere though, there appears to be little news, with the Perth and Melbourne scenes offering scant clues to what's happening, and other areas - like South Australia - offering nothing at all.