Episode 45 - Garry Mckenzie and Quilp, the first known Aboriginal soccer player

Download and listen to episode 45 here.

Partly because Ian is struggling with a pinched nerve, we're joined for the entire episode this week by returning guest Garry Mckenzie. We begin the episode by checking in with the Mark Boric Express, and as well George Cotsanis - where Paul makes an erroneous statement about what they will be uploading separately - it turns out Cotsy has sent Mark parts of a collection he has amassed, and Mark will scan those items. The conversation digresses into the lack of writing being done by local soccer historians, as opposed to a lot of collecting. So where are the narratives? Garry suggests that at the moment the urgency of preservation seems to be taking precedence over narratives.

Then on to the new user interface of Trove, and some of the quibbles members of our soccer history community have with the new layout. This includes the usual reshuffling of things that were once foregrounded to other areas - such as the page which shows new publications uploaded to the site. Other complaints are the fiddly nature of trying to look for specific dates, whereby several (unnecessary) steps have been added. There's also issues with having tags show up at all, and not having the chance to exclude tags from your search.

Photo: Les Street.

Following on from last week's discussion on the death of Walter Williams, Les Street visited the grave site and found that there was stonework with reference to the Victorian Amateur British Football Association (see right). We speculate that there is a headstone with similar references that has been removed - investigations into whether that headstone still exists are ongoing, but have been made more difficult because of the pandemic.

Ian then reads from a piece by Montague Grover about a women's international match between England and France in 1920, a lengthy article which is surprisingly favourable to soccer and to women's involvement in it. We tease out the links to this game (and the article) and the influence that it may have had on women's soccer in Australia at the time - as well as the story of English migrant women playing soccer in Australia at about the same time. We also look at the broken lineages of Australian women's soccer

After the break we jump into 100 Years Ago Today more follow up on the death of Walter Williams - where Miss Jean Thomas, a female friend of Williams, thanks the many people and members of the soccer community who wrote or sent letters and condolences. Then we have the results from Melbourne; then up to Glen Innes for their match against Armidale, and the prospect of soccer getting strong New England; a halftime update in the game between Wallsend and West Wallsend; and the continuing adventures of the HMS Renown.

Dinmore Bush Rats, 2nd Premiers, Ipswich, 1910.
Top row: W. Lucas, W. Pioch, G. Humphrey, D. Potts, N. Randolph.
 2nd row: C. H. Jones (Vice-president), J. Potts (Vice-president), G. Skellern,
 Quilp, A. Nunn, W. Dawes (Treasurer), J. Tedman (Vice-president).
3rd row: W. Jordan (Secretary), J. Burns, J. Staafford (Patron), E. Dawes
(Captain), G. Jones, M. Bailey (President), W. Thompson, A. Stewart
 (Vice-president).  Front row: M. Reichart,  W. Tait, H. Randolph,
 H. Hainsworth (Vice-president).

Then Garry takes up the matter of where his research is at with regards to Quilp, the earliest known Aboriginal soccer player, who was associated with the Dinmore Bushrats and soccer in Ipswich. This follows up on work first done by Ian seven years ago. We discuss the following:

• how we learned about the existence of Quilp.
• who Quilp was and where he came from - including his name, and his alias of Jacky Lynch.
• a look at Quilp's eventful life, most of which had little to do with soccer.
• sifting through what is and is not true about Quilp's life.
• The sensitivities and legal issues in accessing archival material related to Aboriginal people.
• The sensitivities around white settler family histories which may involve cruelty and atrocities committed against Aboriginal people.
• being careful that Quilp's story is not claimed as predominantly or even mostly a soccer story.
• that the main story to be revealed is the experience of Quilp as an Aboriginal man with comparatively strong connections to white society in a time of great change for Aboriginal people.