Episode 53 - Roy Hay on Harry Dockerty and Scots in soccer; Internet Archive

Download and listen to this episode here. 

On this week's episode we begin by acknowledging that George Cotsanis is still doing his interviews, and that Mark Boric's computer has apparently carked it. Paul also notes one of those rarer moments where uploading, saving, and hoarding copious amount of material actually pays off, via being able to provide a link to a podcast interview with Kate Cohen.

Paul talks about finding (and uploading) a stash of mid-2000s Green Gully videos - including a brief rundown of the existence of Trove's archived website search tool, which is analogous to Wayback Machine

Paul then follows up last week's look at the Wayback Machine, by giving a rundown of his early explorations with the Wayback Machine's parent project, the Internet Archive. Paul notes, among other things

• What the Internet Archive is, and how long it's been doing it for
• What kinds of things one can find on the Internet Archive, and what's clearly not there from an Australian soccer standpoint. 
• Contemplating its utility as both a back up and alternative to storing items on servers such as Google's.
• The advantages of uploading to Internet Archive over other services - including the automatic creation of multiple file formats for each item you upload, including text recognition files.
• The disadvantages of uploading to Internet Archive - especially the site's cumbersome search tool.
• A how to (which works much better if you can find the relevant video stream on Facebook) in terms of uploading - including the importance of breadth of subject/tags/labelling, as well as consistency; selecting "English" where appropriate, in order to enable text scanning; as well as a quick demonstration of the ability to fix or add to an item's metadata after the initial upload.

(Due to not being adequately prepared or suitably rehearsed, Paul forgets to mention the "collections" utility - maybe in a future episode)

Our guest this week is Australian soccer's best known and most prolific historian, Roy Hay. After discussing why it took 53 episodes to get him on to the show, we get into a very wide ranging discussion nominally on Victorian soccer player and administrator Harry Dockerty, but also onto other topics as is the wont of people who have known each other for many years. So, in the discussion

• Who was Harry Dockerty - where did he come from and how did he end up in Melbourne?
• What was he like as an administrator, and what kind of obstacles would he have faced as president of Victorian soccer from for the fifty years he was involved with the game?
• The changes in the soccer milieu he would have seen,
• The nature of Scottish immigration to Australia, especially within the context of soccer in Victoria, and the status of the Scots as an ethnic group in their own right.
• The Scots' influence on all codes (and leagues) of football in Victoria.
• The competition and trophy Dockerty established and had named after him, the Dockerty Cup.
• The matter of footballing continuities both social and personal, and for the Dockerty Cup itself.

Roy stays on for the final segment, 100 Years Ago Today, where we in Tasmania we find that the much anticipated North vs South game is a bit of a fizzer; we get a rundown once more on the hopes of getting financial help from the English FA; take a look at the Prenzlau vs Marburg match in Ipswich; check out the Melbourne results; and zip through the South Australian competition, with another hitherto unfamiliar trophy.

Episode 48 - Early days of SBS soccer; Tarrawanna's poor sportsmanship

Download and listen to this episode here.

Paul talks about something stupid he did a few weeks ago, namely the purchase of a medal from the 1926 Dockerty Cup.

Moving on to video games, and an edit file for Pro Evolution Soccer 2020, for which someone has compiled a 1990s National Soccer League league and team set.

Then on to what people have been scanning and uploading.

Paul notes that while trying to find articles with tags in Trove (to help Ian), he came across two letters - one by a J.O. Wilshaw a soccer person, and one by George Cathie, a former VFL player and delegate, and one time editor of the VFL's Football Record. In these letters from early 1953, Wilshaw puts forward the case for why soccer should get access to an enclosed ground in Albert Park, while for his part Cathie responds by making stuff up about soccer in the 1880s both in Australia and in England.

After the break it's time for 100 Years Ago Today, first off to Hobart, where the HMS Renown manages at last to not lose a game, albeit in fortuitous circumstances; to Melbourne, and an extended discussion on the return of the England vs Scotland game for the first time since the end of the war; then to Newcastle, where we look at the recently improved spectator amenities of the Tramways Ground; then south to the Illawarra, where after looking at some results, we get into a heated letter writing stoush on Tarrawanna's apparent lack of sportmanship and manners, with real beaut 1920s polite outrage.

In the final segment, after noting watching a video of Anderlecht-era Eddie Krncevic, Paul discusses this 1980 review of soccer by SBS, as uploaded by George Cotsanis from a video given to him by Tim Paton. An artefact from the very earliest days of SBS TV, Paul discusses:

• the host of the review, Vladimir Lusic, whom Les Murray described as "the quintessential ethnic, almost a living and breathing caricature of the New Australian".
• the critical tone of soccer discussion which SBS brings to the table from the start, and which goes on to influence the nature of Australian soccer discourse for decades to come - including when rival networks seek to play against that tone - as well as a comparison with other sports and their networks.
• the sheen which has worn off the national team since 1974, and the the decline in optimism in the game's fortunes as a whole.
• the sideline and media persona and antics of Socceroos coach Rudi Gutendorf
• a very uncomfortable press conference with Gutendorf, Socceroo captain Murray Barnes, Australian Soccer Federation chairman Arthur George, and Tasmanian delegate Vic Tuting
• what seems like a gradual degradation of team spirit amid mixed results of a long overseas tour.

Episode 22 - an hour long chat about record keeping and cultural memory

Download and listen to episode 22 here.

The latest Mark Boric scan and upload news includes Mark's collaboration with Tony Persoglia. And we wonder what happened to the culture of record?

Ian finds a player missing from Jason Goldsmith's Surfing for England, one Frank Mitchell, who had an extended career in England.

Meanwhile Paul has been watching NFL history videos, specifically this one, which discusses the history NFL name change and franchise moves - and would love to do one for Australian soccer.

Where are the Australian soccer statues? (see this piece for a long read on Australian sports statues) And some spit-balling about would eventually become this map.

Then some chat about a Football Victoria history survey. Then Paul has a go at Football Victoria for its poor record keeping regarding the Dockerty Cup final, and the poor culture of record-keeping for  (you'll have to use your imagination for the papers Paul is holding up which were nominally visible on the Facebook stream).

(On the right, see an extract of a player's record - in this case belonging to Nicholas Tsiaras, a long term soccer official who was even on the Football Victoria board at one point - from the My Cricket website.)

Then 100 Years Ago Today with the 1919 Dockerty Cup final - and more record keeping foibles across the decades. Then to Ipswich and Newcastle, and across the country the soccer competitions are nearing their completion.

Moving on, Ian begins discussing his pending trip to Newcastle, and his desire to catalogue every soccer player from Newcastle prior to World War 1, with the hope of finding each one who enlisted. See this article for more information on the Merewether Advance honour roll. And this for the chat about Billy Maxwell.

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 2 - Australian soccer and literature; Extended trophy discussion

Download and listen to episode 2 here,

Rudderless without George Donikian's guiding hand, Ian and Paul cast off into uncharted waters. The first ten minutes meander with attempts to put forward a manifesto, or at least some sort of method - only committed listeners will find out if any of these regular segments actually materialise.

The whole world then celebrates Paul's finally getting his thesis passed. The thesis was about the relationship between Australian soccer and literature, and soccer and Australian literature,

• the difficulty about talking sport and the arts at the same time in Australian culture.
• the paucity of academic and community awareness of Australian sporting literature.
• the Austlit database, which is accessible via university databases for those in the tertiary sector, and via state library websites.
• the many ways in which the literature differs in its discourses from the ways in which journalism and mainline histories discuss the experience of Australian soccer
• the ways in which the literature challenges monolithic understandings of Australian soccer in terms of ethnicity and gender readings.
• the idea that demographers, historians, sociologists etc have not taken literature seriously when looking at the Australian sporting experience.
• an extended discussion on The Earth Cries Out, Harold C. Wells' novel on mining in the Hunter, which includes occasional snippets on soccer.

After the break, the discussion moves to missing trophies, and particularly Victoria's Beaney Cup, and the George and George Cup, and the sage of their theft, pawning, and involvement in court cases. The discussion also touches on the virtual disappearance of soccer from Victoria during the 1890s and early 1900s.

Then onto the Gardiner Cup, New South Wales' long-running knockout cup, and a discussion of the nature (and material value) of trophies, and the cultural difference between trophies and pennants. Then a discussion on the FA Trophy, which was donated by the Football Association for interstate competition in Australia, which was assumed missing... but is it actually?

And then onto the very well-known story of the fate of the Australia Cup trophy... and how soccer cultures evolve in the things that they care (and don't care about), and the ways in which people in the game take care of historical artefacts - and what happens to a club's trophies if the club goes defunct? And who is responsible for maintaining those artefacts? Oh, and that dreaded museum debate...