Episode 88 - Germanton 1878, with Garry MacKenzie

Download and listen to this episode here.

This week Paul is joined in hosting duties by Garry McKenzie via Zoom. Paul begins this week's show with a discussion about the difficulty of trying to sort through available match footage online of the National Soccer League, as usual through the prism of South Melbourne Hellas. To wit, the discussion focuses on Paul's attempt to try and find what extant Hellas footage exists on the net, and how to organise. His solution at least in terms of record keeping, is the creation and upkeep of an online inventory. Such a list highlights the nature of the extant footage, a history of national league broadcasting, and the near total lack of available footage from sides other than Newcastle KB from the first six seasons or so of the NSL. Might there be extant footage in Adelaide, Brisbane, or Canberra? Have Australian soccer foragers been too Sydney and Melbourne centric?

Garry then discusses going into the Football Queensland history projects archives. The website is getting an update, for starters. As for the archives themselves, there's so much material yet to be processed - programs, women's association archives, photographs - and what needs to be processed, catalogued, scanned, and uploaded, and in what order of priority. Also, Garry got to test the scanner, and it works! 

In our middle segment Paul and Garry discuss the latter's discovery of the earliest (yet) known game of soccer in New South Wales, in what is now Holbrook, in 1878. Among the issues we discuss:

• How Garry found the article, and the need to keep going back to Trove and reconducting old searches as new newspapers are uploaded.
• Who were the participants, and where did they come from - and where did they go.
• Why Germanton/Holbrook.
• The thoroughness of the match report, including its team lists, and the utter unambiguity about which code of football is being discussed.
• Who was the writer.
• What happened next, and is there any evidence of other games of soccer, or evidence that participants in this game played soccer afterward.
• What it means for the importance of the 1880 Wanderers game.

For a write up of the discovery, see the piece on the Shoot Farken website.

In 100 Years Ago Today, a Perth team travels to Bunbury, minus some of its starts who are playing in the UK vs Australia rep game - and thus we discuss native born vs overseas born players; in Albany, the local soccer writer evaluates the local's team performances, player by player; Norths vs Wests in Broken Hill, and another old boy; to Ipswich, and the controversy of Blackstone Rovers leaving the field in protest, and the unintended consequences and possible class connotations of the incident; the continuing momentum of ladies' soccer, and the public support they seem to be receiving; in Brisbane, why wasn't Mitchell passed the ball!; and throughout the whole segment, a discussion of writerly pseudonyms.