Episode 91 - Tony Persoglia, and recent acquisitions of Victorian soccer history archives

Download and listen to this episode here.

Oh boy, lots of technical problems from Paul's end this week. 

Paul is joined in hosting duties this week by Football Victoria History & Heritage Coordinator, Tony Persoglia.

We begin the show by cleaning up some sundry details. Mark Boric retired, but keeps pumping out material! And while Greg Stock is updating OzFootball's National Soccer League archive, what are we going to do with the pages with match comments like the ones here? And we also look at the perils of updating pages and links that are used as references on Wikipedia, which may be the only reference to certain overseas players and their time in Australia. Also, a proposal to maybe get a professional librarian to do a little seminar on how to use Trove better. And finishing with an update on the state and tour game data set and archive update.

In our main segment (best watched maybe on the Facebook stream), Tony talks about the recent soft launch of Football Victoria's history page on Facebook, and the acquisition of photo archive, and hopefully of Victoria's Soccer News. Tony talks about a Hakoah Melbourne archive; a Spotswood (1910s and 20s) cache; the collection of the late Luciano Fioravanti, whose collection spans much of the history of post-war Italian-Australian soccer in Melbourne;, and finally, the archive of Dino DeMarchi, the Juventus (Melbourne) legend of the 1960s.

In our final segment we have 100 Years Ago Today, where Paul's laptop with Windows 10 is just about to keel over and die, and thus we are obliged to rush through Tasmania playing against Victoria a hundred years ago.

Episode 86 - the rise of women's football in Queensland and Sydney

Download and listen to this episode here.

Paul is here. Ian is sort of here. And the banter is also here.

The big news this week is that Mark Boric has retired from his research, archiving, and preservation work on his blog. For the time being at least however, Mark has committed to keeping up his site.

Ian has an update on a segment from last week's episode, where he digs further into the Edwin Aldred story, and the complicated backstory therein: including a contested military history, changing heights and hair colours, and hard fought insurance claims - a saga lasting even posthumously. Ian also follows up on "Pearce" from last week, finding that it's a Samuel Pearce, where we dig into the socio-cultural environment of Weston during that time, including its soccer, musical, and sectarian qualities. 

After the break we go into 100 Years Ago Today, where we get distracted by the history of accountancy and trade. The nurses at Toowoomba are considering starting a football team; more news of women looking to start soccer teams, and a curious reference to women's soccer in Melbourne; could such a thing have actually happened at that time? And plenty of other coverage of the rise of women's football in Queensland and Sydney, and the different ways in which this manifested itself. And Paul is trying to understand how the idea fermented among these women. Who initiated the discussions? What were the differences in approach and appeal for women from Britain compared to those from Australia? How much did the war time experiences influence the push for women's football? And the question which persists in the early history of Australian soccer: why play soccer in this country? And there's even a poem! 

Then the end of the show gets squeezed, hard.

Episode 69 - how soccer exists inside, outside, and nowhere in Australian culture

Download and listen to this episode here.

Paul and Ian are back for another year of If You Know Your History, easing their way into things.. Ian went up to Queensland during the break, and caught up with North Queensland soccer legend Bob Kostic. Ian and Paul reminisce about an Australian soccer historians barbecue held late in December in Melbourne. 

We also not that Tony Persoglia has updated and cleaned up Football Victoria's Hall of Fame digital presence. The South Australians are trying to get a physical museum space open, and Paul and Ian will be keen to catch up with them at some point. Paul mentions that he added to his South Melbourne wiki, modeled after Demonwiki. This leads to chat about databases and how to start and maintain them, and hitting the edge of living memory, and the place (and lack of) mythology in Australian soccer to maintain a "race memory" (as per a discussion last year on Bruce Dawe's Australian Rules poem 'Life Cycle'). A digression, too, into some recent deaths of notable persons in Australian soccer.

Speaking of Greg Stock, we note that he's been working with Doug Butcher to update information on OzFootball, specifically with regard to Australian national men's youth and Olympic teams. And success! Mark Boric's Soccer Action archive is now complete, while also adding other things to his archive, including books and NSL programs. And will Ian ever figure out what happened in Mildura soccer 110 or years ago?

After the break Ian and Paul talk about movies, specifically Ian's having recently watched the Australian Rules film The Merger which to Ian explicably leaves out soccer - and the narrative and cultural ramifications when a movie like this, set in Australia and including migrants likely to have played soccer, leaves out soccer. Paul compares that film to Ali's Wedding, where while soccer is not much more than a background filler, it is still there as an explanatory mechanism. So what does the depiction of soccer in Australian film and television tell us about soccer's cultural place in Australia? And how does that differ with the way soccer might be typically (or atypically) depicted is US film and television? And yes, we also refer to Mustangs FC. So as always, the question remains, how aware are Australians (at various stages) of soccer? How much do they know, profess to know - and just as importantly - profess to not know? And how much of all of this becomes received wisdom that needs to be unlearned?

In the final segment, we do 100 Years Ago Today. The Corinthians in Queensland cancel a meeting, because they go the theatre; Kangaroo Point to set up a club? In South Australia, Mr. and Mrs. A. Maton depart for Adelaide, leaving behind the Murray Bridge soccer scene; in Sydney, St George are preparing for the new season; West Wallsend are getting their committee in order; an extended report from the Northern District British Football Association in Newcastle, and following on from the successful 1920 season; and tumbleweeds from elsewhere in Australian, but is there an anti-soccer conspiracy to not report on the code?

Episode 40 - Italian merger flowchart; making sense of records

Three magpies in Paul's front yard.

Download and listen to episode 40 here.

This episode begins by not starting with the Mark Boric Express. Ian and Paul raise the possibility of the discussion point of Australian soccer clubs which also have teams in other sports. Maybe we'll revisit this at some time in the future. Then there's the search for any memorial for Wally Tunn at Toorak Park... nothing there. Then we raise the matter of Australian soccer cartoons and comics, and the possibility perhaps of setting up a database to collect and sort them out. We note that the NT Army News is now online... it might be worth looking for the soccer references.

We look at Mark Boric's processes as he tries to figure out as complete a record as possible for the 1925 Victorian Division 4 season. Ian follows this up with the sketchiness of Victorian results from mid-May 1920, and Paul briefly spiels on the theory of incrementalism. Ian then expounds on an unusual case of public transport protectionism in 1933 in Leeton, near Griffith - and how soccer players were caught up in a strange legal mess.

In the second segment (which people who aren't watching the stream will not get full value from), we look at Paul's attempt to update the infamous Victorian Italian club merger flowchart. The original version of the family tree is now lost, but the second version of the flowchart, which dates back to 2012, has earned its own rare sort of online infamy. Paul posits that what started as a joke on Victoria's soccer-forum.net - mostly at the expense of Melbourne's Italian community and especially the fracture of the once mighty Brunswick Juventus - might actually be a useful way of tracking club histories and trajectories. Indeed, Paul argues that the idea of the soccer club family tree could be applied across the country, especially in parts where Australian soccer has had a long but fractured presence. We look at Paul's work-in-progress attempt at an update and expansion of the work. The flowchart helps prompt some interesting questions - why does Melbourne's Italian soccer community stop supporting as a collective in the way that other (major) ethnic clubs do? Where do all the fans go? Why does Brunswick Juventus lose fans, even as Italians set up a multitude of smaller, lower-tier, "neighbourhood" clubs?

In our final segment we go into 100 Years Ago Today, and the gradual increase in teams in the Melbourne competition; to Fremantle; and then to Moora, about 150 miles north of Perth, where the soccer club has gone defunct with enough left in the club kitty to buy everyone a beer. But where did the soccer players end up? You may be surprised... Then to Hobart, and what seems like a spirit of cooperation between soccer and Australian rules... Ian and Paul wonder what's caused this spirit of bonhomie? And finally to Minmi, with a severe point deduction, and working and pay conditions at the local mine.

Episode 39 - Greg Stock and the future of Australian soccer history

Download and listen to episode 39 here.

On this week's episode we begin by catching up with the Mark Boric Express where, apart from his uploads, he's been attempting to improve upon the extant records from Victorian soccer's 1910s, 20s, and 30s - and looking especially at the many difficulties in reconciling obviously incorrect and/or competing archival narratives. We then move on trying to understand why Rale Rasic and Bob Marley are posing with a stuffed panda at Adelaide City in the late 1970s - including an answer from current member of the South Australian partliament, Frank Pangallo. And then a quick update on Paul's map, and some audience feedback on using the Ancestry.com database for Australian soccer research.

Then to 100 Years Ago Today, beginning in Western Australia and Ian's fascination with the perplexing change in writing style within the article; then to Sydney, where we look at the rugby league news, and the noting that soccer has established itself in one-time rugby league strongholds. Still in Sydney, and a discussion about amateurism in rugby league from an important Australian historical figure. Then to Melbourne's results, and looking forward to the Prince of Wales' tour. And finally, a note on so-called "Germanised sport", as opposed to proper English conduct on the sporting field - and the hypocrisies of an Australian writer discussing this within the context of the Australian spotting public's love of gambling, barracking, and win-at-all costs mentality.

After the break we talk to returning guest Greg Stock, to talk about how Australian soccer history and historians moves forward after the pandemic. We discuss the possibility of history being placed into the "too-hard basket" in amid the financial and logistical constraints brought upon by the pandemic; the placing of history within the need to be "valued adding", that is history not being valuable in and of itself; the different ways soccer historians and non-soccer historians value Australian soccer history; the historic trends of volunteers and enthusiastic entrepreneurs filling in gaps in mainstream and official soccer media infrastructures; the history of amateur collaborative work in spite of the lip-service paid by official bodies.

Paul seems particularly keen on just pushing ahead with the Australian soccer tradition of quasi-anarchic, decentralised historical work; the unlikely scenario where federations hire historians; Greg notes the fact that federations still handle their own current statistical records poorly, but Paul also adds the lack of interest from ordinary soccer participants in maintaining contemporary records, including of their own participation - this is the idea that if change is to come from anywhere, it must come from soccer's mainline participant base, not from niche historical busybodies. But how do we get those people interested? How do we convince them that they are living in history, and that their presence matters?

In the final segment, Ian revisits some earlier work on soccer in the regional Queensland town of Warwick.

Episode 37 - Club death, St George, Moorabbin City; Mark Boric

Download and listen to episode 37 here.

Ian's out of the studio again, so Paul is joined by Mark Boric, of the scanning and uploading of Australian soccer documents fame.

After summing up - in person! - what's he's been up to, we segue into 100 Years Ago Today, where preparations for the 1920 season are getting underway in Sydney, Brisbane, Ipswich, Boolaroo, Killingworth (complete with chocolate waltz), North Adelaide, while Geraldton prepares to play another visiting ship, and Pelaw-Main reports problems with cabling.

Against the background of previous discussions on the show about soccer ceasing or dying in certain areas, the threat of the COVID-19 virus to sport, and last week's discussion on the demise of Footscray JUST, we then move into an attempt to discuss the various ways in which soccer clubs have perished in Australia. We also try something a bit different - attempting to solicit calls from our audience to discuss the ways in which they experienced the demise of a club.

It's not an entirely successful affair - we get just one caller - but we're called by Robert, a former St George Budapest supporter who discusses what it was like to watch the decline of one Australia's great clubs firsthand - from the club's glory days of the 1960s, through to declining crowds (and attempts to go mainstream) in the 1970s, even as the club had half the national team which went to the World Cup; the occasionally successful NSL years, with still diminishing crowds, and then ignominious exit from the NSL in 1991.

We discussed how in a way, St George is the archetypal example of the decline (and for some, demise) of an ethnic soccer club - a strong, but short-lived migrant push, successful teams, and a conflicted but still more than half-hearted attempt to go mainstream which ultimately. We also noted that St George's story has been told several times - by Johnny Warren in Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters, by Les Murray in By the Balls, and to a certain extent by Joe Gorman in The Death and Life of Australian Soccer. 

But through our discussion with Robert, we also touch on one contentious fact - St George isn't dead. And yet, for most of its one time supporters, culturally the club is dead, despite a legal entity still persisting in the upper tiers of NSW soccer. We therefore pose the question - when does a club actually die? It can't be merely a legal criteria, but one also tied to names, personnel, culture, colours and a sense of feeling.

And thus we do a bit of a rushed inventory of Australian top-tier clubs which have perished and how; mergers and takeovers; broke during the NSL and because of it; broke shortly after leaving the NSL; reformed and thus still alive for those who wish it so; tenuous legal arguments which won't convince anyone of their veracity; variations where some claim the club died, others claim there is legitimate continuity, and where they both may be right; and the dying and revival of successor clubs to represent the regions.

We don't have enough time to get too deep into other examples of clubs dying - due to war; expulsion; loss of ground; hostile takeover or uneven merger; works teams with no works; women's team which never properly belong to any club; regional and representative teams; kick about teams which got serious and organised for a short time, but which ended up folding as their first generation fell away.

The final segment is taken up with Mark Boric relating the strange demise of Moorabbin City in the 1990s, and the effect it had on him living through that demise. Mark had hinted at this story before, but here it is now in the open - the strange confluence of an old-fashioned "player-run" Melbourne soccer club, the fading English power club trying to get ahead of the curve, and decades-old personality clashes that scuppered not just Villa's attempt to set up an academy in Australia, but also contributed to the club that it was partner closing its doors. The players and committee were scattered far and wide, some lost to the game, and what little memorabilia was left mostly saved by Mark, and uploaded onto his blog and YouTube.

Episode 35 - Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) database; demise of AAP

Download and listen to episode 35 here.

On this week's episode, Paul is joined in hosting duties by George Cotsanis, who's filling in for Ian Syson who's suffering from vertigo. We start off with catching up with what George has been keeping busy with, which includes a scrapbook from an old club coming soon, and a newly sourced (and re-found) team photo of the short-lived Victorian club Footscray Capri. George also has some Betamax tapes from Gary Cole's collection, but he needs a working Betamax machine to see what's on them - can any of our listeners help?

We then move on to the news of the day, which is the imminent demise of Australian Associated Press. While noting the devastating impact AAP's closure will have on the quality and breadth of news coverage in Australia - and on the journalists who will lose their livelihoods - Paul, George and the show's producer Josh Parish focus on what the possible effects will be for Australian soccer coverage, including the future historical archive.

This includes the impacts on coverage of national level soccer in smaller media markets like Tasmania; Vince Rugari's and Mike Tuckerman's points that coverage of small, low interest games like Mariners vs Phoenix in Gosford might disappear; Josh's note that even the online dedicated soccer press, like SBS' The World Game, also rely heavily on AAP content, and that AAP writers are often the only people attending press conferences.

Paul goes on to note that even if the soccer specific press fills in the gap left by the demise of AAP, the deficiencies of being soccer specific sites means that the game will lose a connection to mainstream sporting news coverage, even if that coverage was already marginal. On top of that, there's the still the issue of print primacy when it comes to archives - websites and web pages are still liable to disappear without a trace, taking with them the public record in a way that the demise of print news does not.

We also look at the parallels in historic lapses of coverage, reportage, and record keeping in Australian soccer. There's also the observation by Les Street that AAP reports made up a huge chunk of National Soccer League reporting, especially in the 1990s and 2000 once papers like Soccer Action ceased running. (Greg Werner also wonders what will happen to AAP's photographic archive.)

We finish off the opening segment of the episode by quickly looking at Mark Boric's latest update, wherein he foresees a likely end to his frantic mass scanning sessions, unless there's a major donation or find.

Our main topic for this week is Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) database, and the soccer references contained within. In its own words, the AustLII database:

provides free internet access to Australasian legal materials. AustLII's broad public policy agenda is to improve access to justice through better access to information. To that end, we have become one of the largest sources of legal materials on the net, with over four million searchable documents. 

AustLII publishes public legal information -- that is, primary legal materials (legislation, treaties and decisions of courts and tribunals); and secondary legal materials created by public bodies for purposes of public access (law reform and royal commission reports for example) and a substantial collection of law journals.

We look at the wide range of legal genres that AustLII covers, among them:

• ombudsman reports
• visa and migration tribunals
• judgements from criminal courts and civil proceedings
• town planning and local government regulations
• industrial relations tribunals
• liquor licencing
• discrimination hearings 
• government gazettes

All these genres (and the many others besides) when looked at with a soccer lens show us a different side of the game apart from the goals and glory that is the primary interest of so many. It shows up the administrative side of the game, and the ways in which Australian soccer is connected to crucial elements of Australian life via its interactions with the legal system. Foreign players on visas - and the clubs that have hired them - find things go wrong.

There's ombudsman's reports into the chaotic political party and ethnic factional machinations of local councillors, and the ways in which soccer clubs trying to get access to grounds (and funding) were intimately connected to those shenanigans.

Perhaps most curiously, you have likely non-soccer followers making judgements on the relative merits of Australian soccer and Australian clubs, in terms of national and international prestige. For example, one arbiter of justice had this to say about long defunct Tasmanian club Hobart Azzurri:

Hobart City Azzuri Soccer Club is not a national soccer club (such as, for example, the "Socceroos"). Nor is it a national soccer organisation (such as the "Australian Soccer Federation"). Whilst it may be possible for a local soccer club to have a "national reputation" I do not think on the evidence before me, that Hobart City Azzuri Soccer Club enjoys such a reputation.

There are also documents from court proceedings from clubs taking on their respective federations, the kind of thing which is crucial to understanding the history of soccer in Australia. In short, the AustLII database is a wonderful and probably under-utilised resource in terms of researching Australian soccer history.

In our final segment, Ian calls in from home to do his 100 Years Ago Today segment. He looks at the ongoing preparations for the oncoming 1920 season in Newcastle,  ads for football boots in Queensland, and the simmering tension of the club vs district debate. Elsewhere though, there appears to be little news, with the Perth and Melbourne scenes offering scant clues to what's happening, and other areas - like South Australia - offering nothing at all.

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 27 - Roberto Pennino; Superga air disaster; Record Keeping

Download and listen to episode 27 here.

In this episode we cover the deficiencies in record keeping in Football Victoria's state league leading goalscorers and its best and fairest tallies, and ask who's responsible for maintaining the game's records.

We also look at the based-on-an Aboriginal war-cry chant used by the Queensland state team in 1925, and the relationship of Aboriginal kitsch to Australian soccer.

Ian brings up his segment, which is called "Short Memory", on the eternal forgetting of the game - that is, the habit of soccer forgetting its history. Ian reads from his blog, which you can read here.

The main part of the episode is dedicated to a chat with visiting writer Roberto Pennino, who has written books (published in Dutch and Italian language editions) about the Superga air disaster, which in 1949 claimed almost the entirety of playing squad of the great Torino side of the 1940s. (Roberto has also written a book about Dutch footballers in Italy, in Dutch).

We also manage to get some chat about the research on Dutch-Australian soccer clubs which Roberto is helping Adam Muyt with. (Adam is also in the room off mic in the final segment).

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.