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...