Episode 60 - Official and unofficial songs; the nature of soccer in 1880s Melbourne

Download and listen to this episode here.

There's always new stuff on Trove, wouldn't you know? Then there's the clean-up, including the way that our little network helped a previous guest with finding out information about a little known league from Melbourne's far-eastern suburbs in the 1950s. 

We also have a ramshackle discussion about Australian club songs - not post-match victory songs, but rather official and unofficial club anthems - prompted by a discussion on Twitter on the Canberra Cosmos' supporters CD. We look at the existence of such as songs as:

• Newcastle KB
• Canberra City
• Sydney and/or Melbourne Croatia
• APIA Liechhardt
• Melbourne Victory's Terrace Punk Band
• and several others.

And the different motivations for creating official and unofficial songs depending on the era of Australian soccer.

We finish up the first segment by looking at a photo of people kicking a soccer ball at Gallipoli - what are they doing?

In 100 Years Ago Today, we take a lengthy look at a big fundraising soccer match in Mount Barker in South Australia, and the social events held thereafter, while also wondering why there's no match report for the men's vs women's match; and we head to Sydney where the season just seems to be dragging on interminably, and thus we discuss comparing the length of a typical soccer season in Sydney to its rugby league counterpart; then to Newcastle, where  the long-drawn-out soccer season has seen Adamstown's cricket team forfeit matches; then we run out of time to talk about everything else because of poor time management.

In the final segment, we revisit the 1880s in Victoria. A few episodes ago, Ian looked at new discoveries which pushed the supposed end date of the first phase of Melbourne soccer a little further than previously assumed; now to the 1880s, where Ian has found more games, and more kinds of fixtures (including north vs south of the Yarra games). We also start discussing the demographic make-up of 1880s Melbourne soccer, including people such as the future premier of Victoria, Thomas Bent, and the what the membership numbers mean in terms of how the soccer club operates within playing and social spheres. Oh, and speculation on the possible effect of the 1890s economic depression on the kinds of people involved with Melbourne soccer at the time, as well as how social class shaped early Melbourne soccer. There's also horse riders complain about soccer goalposts, and the public usage of the precinct known as Yarra Park.

Episode 32 - Francesco Ricatii, Matthew Klugman, & Italian-Australian soccer fans

Download and listen to episode 32 here.

Our final episode for 2019 sees the return of Tony Persoglia after illness to co-host the show.

We look at the Mark Boric Express, where the lid on Mark's scanner has cracked. Still, he's pushing on with the scanning and uploading. We note that one of the more interesting/diverting elements that Mark uploaded during the week was an extract from the Brisbane soccer publication Go Soccer, which included a series of a potential names and logos for what would eventually become Brisbane United, and later Brisbane Strikers.

George Cotsanis has uploaded the film reel footage of the second leg of the Australia vs Israel World Cup qualifier from 1969, thus completing the uploads of the various film reels he bought last year.

We also note that Chris Jack - the son of Australian soccer journalist David Jack - is considering distributing his late father's collection of football pins. Chris is planning on photographing and setting up a catalogue of the pin collection, and interested parties should keep tabs on Chris' social media accounts for updates.

In our final 100 Years Ago Today for the year, we look only briefly at Newcastle Catholics; we troll Ian Syson with a 100 year-old Sunderland result; and we get some closure on the match between the crew of the visiting wheat ship, the David Lloyd George, and the local soccer players of Geraldton - whose cricket game from the previous week was postponed to accommodate the soccer match.

We conclude the segment by taking a brief look at the epithet "the simple game", which appeared in a December 1919 article in English rugby league, and which is used sparingly in both positive and negative ways by different writers.

In our middle segment, we talk to Francesco Ricatti and Matthew Klugman, who have co-authored a couple of academic papers of interest:

• Connected to Something’: Soccer and the Transnational Passions, Memories and Communities of Sydney's Italian Migrants, from 2013
• Re-Creating Home and Exploring Away in New Cities: Italian Migration and Football Codes Within Australian Urban Centres, from 2019

(As these are papers published in academic journals, in general they are not available to the general public, but if you would like a copy of either of them, just drop Paul a line)

Primarily an oral history project, Ricatti and Klugman's collaboration looks not just at Italian-Australians' involvement within Australian soccer, but also how that involvement with - or in some cases, distance from - Australian soccer shaped their non-soccer lives, and their understanding of what it means to be Italian, Australian, and Italian-Australian. The discussion covers, among other things, questions of identity; individual and community agency; the ways in which attachment to different sports created differing ideas of 'home'; different experiences of Italian-Australian soccer on the basis of gender, class, and age; the difference in the supporter types between Brunswick Juventus, Marconi, and APIA; and the interaction of Italian-Australians involved with soccer with members of other ethnic communities involved with Australian soccer.

In our final segment, we go through the results of an impromptu call-out to our friends and audience to see what historical projects people were looking to work on. And we got a great response - books, websites, blogs, databases, stats projects, maps, archives, kit projects, archives, digitisation - there's so much going on, with ample scope for collaboration across the projects. Best of all, there's evidence that the show has become one of the key nexus points in sharing the passion for Australian soccer history research.

We finish off with thanking a whole bunch who have helped make the show in 2019.

Episode 18 - Victor Brincat, George Cross and the Australia Cup

Download and listen to episode 18 here.

A little bit on listener Paul Nicholls' father Don reuniting with an old teammate Bruce from their days playing together Gladesville Methodists 70 years ago.

Garry McKenzie finds the original source for an 1870 game of soccer mentioned in Peter Kunz's Chronicles of Soccer in Australia - and the problems of figuring out where the 19th century and early 20th century Australian press sourced their stories from.

Then on to a TV clip that came up on Twitter discussion, about the time the 1970s American cop drama McLeod filmed an episode in Australia, which included a game with APIA as part of their story.

Following is a quick digression about what soccer films exist in Australia, including ex-NSL player Leigh Tsoumerkas' recollections of the VIS team's cameo in The Heartbreak Kid.

And for some reason some chat about Craig Johnston and comments he made about political correctness.

After the break we chat with Victor Brincat, soccer historian interested in the club now known as Caroline Springs George Cross. We cover:

• The difficulty of getting any information from the early days of clubs like George Cross.
• The practical priorities of club committees ignoring the importance of the proper maintenance of historical records.
• George Cross' bridesmaid's role during the 1960s and 70s in Victorian soccer, and the hollowness of the eventual title breakthrough in 1977.
• The 1964 Australia Cup, and the permanent donation of the Australia Cup to George Cross, after its rescue from the rubbish and its subsequent restoration.
• The assumption by many that Sydney clubs, with their superior financial backing would dominate the Australia Cup.
• The habit of Australia Cup winners - Yugal, Slavia, Melbourne Hungaria - of eventually going defunct.
• The decline of clubs soccer alongside the demise of the Australia Cup.
• Victor's recollections of the 1964 Australia Cup final.
• George Cross' excellent presentation of history in their social club.
• The mini-documentary made by Ben Coonan for Fox Sports, of the Australia Cup being presented to George Cross including footage of the 1964 Australia Cup final.
• The story of how that footage came to light.

Then 100 Years Ago Today where we being with Dockerty Cup results, and where does Preston play? Next we go to Bowral, aka the middle of nowhere; then to Lithgow, and what else is there to do there? And accusations of sabotage!