Episode 54 - Tim Cahill's "Legacy"

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After an interminable amount of what Ian calls "banter" - including a digression into the what the first post on Ian's blog, which was about the morphogloy of the word "soccer" - we finally begin with the clean-up. This includes some feedback from Tony Smith on the "Basse Cup; Garry MacKenzie finds a history page dedicated to the early days of the University of Queensland Soccer Club in 1955, which includes a hefty Chinese and Asian influence from its overseas student cohort - the kind of thing which could help re-write or add nuance to narratives of ethnicity in Australian soccer. Paul Nicholls found a player who played in Scotland in the late 1800s who played in Charters Towers in inland Queensland.

Paul gives an update on establishing "collections" on Internet Archive - including the establishment of a National Soccer League match programs collection, and an Australian Soccer Yearbooks collection. This discussion gets diverted into a discussion about the merits and path forward for Mark Boric's blog-based library, and the fragility of anarchic and independent digital archives. But can we rely on system-less collection and hoarding? On the other hand, can we rely on federations and libraries?

In 100 Years Ago Today, we begin in Geraldton, where we try to figure out how big the local competition might be, and where does the soccer impulse evident there originate from?; then to Melbourne, for an extended discussion on the merits of changing the scoring system in Australian Rules, via the (re(introduction of a crossbar; a brief stop in Uralla; to Brisbane, where letter writer 'Spectator' discusses the merits of the scoreless draw he witnessed the week before; a Sydney point-of-view of the Queenslanders' tour; and finally skimming through whatever it is that's happening in Melbourne.

In our final segment, Paul looks at Tim Cahill's autobiography Legacy, where he looks at the story of the much-loved greatest of all our national team players. Topics covered include:

• Cahill's relentless obsession with football from a very young age.
• The near-complete sidelining of his sense of "Englishness" in favour of a "Samoan-ness".
• His difficult working class upbringing, which is discussed by Cahill with little sense of class consciousness.
• Cahill's working class and Samoan values of hard work, tenacity, and loyalty to those you care about.
• His junior years spent playing up an age group, before eventually hitting the "too small to play" brick wall.
• Cahill's years at Millwall including the nature of the club, its rites of passage, and the way Cahill was able to fit in within that culture.
• Cahill's change from lower-class Sydney kind to wealthy footballer with famous friends.

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.