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We being by noting that the passing references Ian likes to make to the Kevin Borich Express (vis a vis Ian's play on words for the Mark Boric Express) turn out to have a soccer connection - the Kevin Borich Express' bassist from 1976-80, Tim Partridge (who recently passed away) had played for Caledonians in Tasmania, as noted by Walter Pless.
We then note, as we do, the efforts of folk like Mark Boric and George Cotsanis, and then quickly move on to some interesting minor progress on Paul's Internet Archive project.
Following on from last week's unearthing of a colour photograph of the champion 1960s Slavia team from Melbourne - as well the discussion on the state of Australian soccer articles on Wikipedia - Tony Persoglia has added a paragraph on Peter Aldis' Wikipedia page on Aldis' time in Australia. Some people may be surprised to know that a well-credentialed player like Aldis - who had won the FA Cup with Aston Villa in 1957 - could have played in Australia.
Ian finishes off the first segment by looking at a hitherto under-utilised resource - the Gazette section of Trove. Ian provides a sample of the kinds of things he's found with relation to soccer, including burglaries, and attempts at copyright. It's hard to know how much and what kind of material may be in the gazettes, but what is there includes names, trophies, and hidden historical details and lines of inquiry not covered by newspaper searches.
In 100 Years Ago Today, we begin in Melbourne, with a benefit match for a memorial for the late Walter Williams; then to Albany, where code co-operation seems to be the order of the day, but is soccer the sport in ascendancy? Over to Gosford, where a serious injury to (we assume) a rugby player leads to best wishes, but also a digression into the merits of the different football codes; in Geraldton it's the English-born vs the Australian-born; back in Sydney, a trophy gets re-named in honour of a soccer played who died during the war; and in Newcastle, Ian and Paul still can't make head or tails of the political machinations involved in selecting a Gardiner Cup venue.
The last segment is a bit of a rambling discussion on religion in Australian soccer, which somehow makes few to no references to the discussion on this theme which Paul and Ian had back in episode 9, or the look at Knox City back in episode 7. Anyway, it begins with Ian bringing up a story from 1913 of a Scots soccer playing, Catholic priest, who we don't know the identity of. Look, like Paul says religion seems to pay very little importance in pre-1945 soccer, and soccer participation is probably much more linked to ethnicity (specifically British), class (dependant on the place and time), and the part of Australia that one is playing soccer in; that there is a not enough of a critical mass pre-war in many soccer communities for there to be angst about religion at the expense of playing the game.
But what about post-war? Did the large influx of Catholic migrants create a new sense of feeling within Australian Catholicism as a whole for soccer? Paul thinks not, because Catholic educational institutions were probably still wedded to "traditional" Australian sports, and though the number of Catholics increased thanks to the emigration of Croatians, Italians, Maltese, Poles, and so forth, those communities would have established their own church communities apart from the then mainline Irish Catholic network. While these churches and their pastors would have been broadly supportive of efforts by thier community to establish soccer clubs, and may have been involved. Paul argues that the clubs were first and foremost set up around ethnicity and language, not religion, with the names of the clubs reflecting that.
(one also has to be careful in dealing with questions of ethnic and ethno-religious essentialism; that is, not every person who belongs to a particular ethnic community is a member of the dominant religious affiliation of that community)
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