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.

Episode 17 - Peter Kunz's Chronicles of Soccer in Australia; Dinmore Bushrats

Download and listen to episode 17 here.

We celebrate George Costanis getting brought into the inner-sanctum of Roma... withh noting erroneously that he'd been flown over by Roma to hand over precious film reels.

We move on to Mark Boric, who'd written a short piece on the history Dockerty Cup, the final of which was being played that week in Melbourne.

We note that the Australia Cup trophy, salvaged from oblivion, will be donated permanently to the Caroline Springs (formerly Sunshine) George Cross club.

Then Garry McKenzie has prompted Ian to dig through the archives and perhaps reevaluate assumptions about early South Melbourne soccer (with clarification of the difference between Emerald Hill and South Park). And was soccer the punk rock of 1880s Melbourne sport?

Then 100 Years Ago Today where we do our usual trawling through 1919 Victorian soccer results. Then up to Queensland and Musgrave Park and Pineapple Rovers. Then to Western Australia and the burgeoning florid rhetoric of the code wars - with a particular emphasis on the effects of nationalism on our sporting preferences and loyalties.

Following the break is a discussion with Scott Morrison and Garry McKenzie on the revival of the historic Ipswich club Dinmore Bushrats - an unusual discussion going back into the depths of time and dealing with very recent events, and dealing with the difficulties of maintaining historical memory over such a large span of time.

In the final segment, Garry Mckenzie sticks around to join Paul and Ian in a very thorough analysis of Peter Kunz's Chronicles of Soccer in Australia:The Foundation Years - 1859-1949, an important book defined by its sense of overwhelming ambition. We look at:

• The book being both unique in terms of its ambition, but also typical of Australian soccer historiography in that an author, going it alone, saw a gap in the existing knowledge, and tried to fill-in the sprawling void of knowledge.
• A rundown of the book - charting the status of soccer across the states through the decades.
• Women's soccer and international tours.
• Kunz revealing a sense of British identity, including one independent of blase notions of coal-miners; the effects of works teams in suburban areas; and the ways that British ideas of professionalism clash with Australian ideals of amateurism.
• The transient influence of visiting (merchant and military) ships to Australian soccer.
• The technological limitations of the project in terms of it being a book and not an easy-to-update online database, especially for its list of catalogue clubs.
• The catalogue of over 2000 clubs making up the final third of the book.
• Its drawbacks, including a lack of referencing, and a sense of overreach of being too eager to claim certain dates and games as being soccer instead of other football codes
• The problems of using the date '1859' as a starting point.
• Its errors and the way they've come about - perhaps due to a lack of a methodology chapter and literature review. 
• That in spite of drawbacks, it's an incredible book that should be treated first as a prime example of a labour love; the book is magnificent, but many of its assertions must be handled with care; and that triangulation of details remains an imperative.
• The book is a correction to the over-emphasis on post-1945 soccer.

Episode 8 - Vanessa Lucchesi; Adelaide City archives; 100 year old clubs; AFRA

We received our first not-entirely solicited
 call-in during this episode.

Download and listen to episode 8 here.

This episode begins with cleanup and promotion of book launches, followed by discussion about the existence of extant 100-year-old clubs across the country, and the reasons why some areas are comparatively rich in centurion clubs compared to others.

Then we get our first ever unprompted call - from Vanessa Lucchesi - who has done an honours thesis on ethnic football clubs in post-war South Australia. Vanessa also looks after and researches the archives held by Adelaide City. The discussion expands to include segments on ethnicity; the history of Adelaide City; and the scale of the club's archives.

We then return to our discussion of 100-year-old clubs; the attempt to resuscitate the Dinmore Bushrats as a continuation of the tradition of the historical (but defunct) club; the messy attempts by South Melbourne to claim elements of its own history and the soccer history of the local area it has previously rejected; Moreland City's attempts to claim a cultural continuity back to 1916, through several splits and mergers; comparisons with the continuity at South Hobart; we ask the question why did pre-World War 2 clubs survive and thrive in some areas, despite the arrival of ethnic clubs; and that analysis which enables a dominant single narrative to emerge is impossible, because the experience and history of soccer varies significantly across Australia, and that even if there are administrative and financial centres, in cultural terms the application of a sense a hegemonic history is impossible to assert.

In the episode's very wide-ranging final segment, Ian brings up his idea of establishing the Association of Football Resources in Australia (AFRA), a proposed body which would oversee the protection and preservation of Australia's soccer resources and archives.

We run out of time during this episode to do a proper 100 Years Ago Today segment, but you can chase up what was meant to be on that week's segment here.