Episode 62 - reviewing 100 Years Of Moreland City documentary, with Jason Gioldsmith

Download and listen to this episode here.

A reminder that the Football Writers Festival is happening on the 21st and 22nd of November in Sydney.

Mark Boric Express continues, with copies of Brisbane's Soccer News. George Cotsanis is wondering why a video of Indonesia vs Australia from 1980 is ratcheting up the views.

Oh, and a quick follow up on Dr Snowden Hay from last week, thanks to Paul Hunt,

A look at the Rainford Cup, which is in the United Kingdom for some reason, after being in Sydney,, after being in the UK.

Then some more on soccer in Murray Bridge, with more on GR Handley, a soccer administrator with many hands in many pots. Media, mutual respect between codes, Britishness, social events, and the rise and fall of soccer and other sports in the region all get an airing, 

We're joined this week by returning guest (and occasional co-host) Jason Goldsmith, to discuss the 2016 documentary Moreland City -100 Years Strong, which was produced by George Donikian. We discuss:

• Mythologies, origins, and the problems with making judgements with exceedingly scarce information, and the "1916 problem".
• Not much information on pre-1945.
• The doco's seeming emphasis on Moreland ahead of Park Rangers and Coburg (and Brunswick and Hakoah)
• The lack of chat about the grounds the various clubs used other than Campbell Reserve
• British migration stories, and the involvement of Ten Pound Poms (and Scots) in Melbourne soccer (and the lack of insight into the lack of broader involvement in local soccer by that group).
• Moreland's 1950s success (trophy and player-wise) accelerating that club's decline into irrelevance at the hands of the ethnic clubs.
• The difficulty in making mergers work, especially with a local rival.
• The feelings of loss and only gradual feeling of a new club being equal (or close to) in your heart as your fist club.
• Missing out on the journey up the leagues, and whether parts of the club ethos have changed in their rise up the leagues - including professionalism.
• The good archival content, especially photographic and artefact content.

If you are interested in viewing this documentary, please contact the Moreland City club.

(Paul reviewed this film upon first viewing it back in 2016 - you need to scroll down a bit)

In 100 Years Ago Today we head to Newcastle; some pointed commentary about the "Irish" national team from an Adelaide newspaper; A Brisbane report about an upcoming women's football international between Britain and France; and Sydney reports about other international games.

Episode 41 - a potted history of coaching; Darwin soccer in 1941

Download and listen to episode 41 here.

This week sees us still broadcasting from remote locations. We begin the call asking if anyone can help us get in contact with Geoff Huxley, who is responsible for compiling this dossier on soccer in Murwillumbah. Likewise, we ask if someone who knows Rocco Di Zio could possibly give him a nudge in terms of getting back to Paul's messages looking for help with the ongoing Victorian Italian merger flowchart - some subsequent updates of which are provided in this week's episode.

Ian then follows up on his work on 1920s Mildura soccer, and the surprising strength of the game in the area being revealed as more material becomes available on Trove.

Following from last week's passing note of the 200 odd soccer references in the Army News (1940-1946) in Darwin, Paul looks into what was going on there in 1941, and some of the difficulties in making sense of the research. There are no mentions of soccer in 1940, though there does appear to have been soccer played, as there is mention of a previous armed forces league champion. The coverage begins some time into the 1941 season, which is played during the north Australian wet season.

There's a steep learning curve in looking at this material for those unfamiliar with military jargon, slang, and ranks. This includes references to ranks as abbreviations, which may sometimes look like initials preceding a surname.

Table from the Army soccer league in Darwin, from 11th December 1941.

Most of the articles seem to be written by members of the relevant battalions, as part of their coverage of the social life of the armed forces in Darwin during World War 2. Soccer is, of course, just one of a number of sports being played in Darwin by members of the armed forces. There are about 8-10 teams in the competition, although it is difficult to figure out fixtures, which are generally played midweek and on weekends. Each team also seems to have a variety of names - a battalion or company name, the battalion's nickname, a nickname such as Wanderers or Wombats, and sometimes a locale. This makes things more difficult to discern what's what.

Most players are unnamed, except for goalscorers, and even there it is usually only a surname, sometimes preceded by a generic nickname. It is generally difficult at this early part of the research to find whether players in this competition had also played in civilian soccer beforehand. One person who did play civilian soccer, and who is mentioned in these articles - but who was not involved with Darwin soccer - was Wally Magee, who represented Australia in the B Internationals against the visiting Chinese team in 1941. Magee, who had played for the strong Metters side in New South Wales, had most most recently played and dominated for Moreland in the less competitive Melbourne competition. Magee is noteworthy here for having died while on service in Port Moresby.

In this week's Mark Boric Express we note that Mark has uploaded some annual reports from New South Wales, while continuing to work in his Victorian season files - in this case 1932. We also note fellow Football Nation Radio presenter Joey Lynch having written a good little piece on Ferenc Puskas' time in Australia, on the ESPN site.

In our middle segment, we take a meandering look at the history of coaching in Australia, inspired by Vince Rugari's story on Roberto Venturato, an Australian-born coach on the cusp of taking a minnow club in the form of Cittadella to Serie A. It's essentially a rambling look at the history of coaching in Australian soccer. It begins with looking at some of the Australian coaches who have tried their hand at coaching in overseas competitions. Paul notes that a lot of the Australian coaches who have coached overseas have probably done so in the Pacific and South-East Asia - like Scott O'Donnell, Darren Stewart, and Mehmet Durakovic - and thus are not in competition which Australian soccer fans pay much attention to. Then follows some off the cuff comments on 'name' overseas coaches imported to Australia.

Ian then moves the discussion to trying to research soccer and coaching on Trove. There's the catch of "coach" often referring to travelling by coach, rather than the meaning of coach as instruction or training. Ian also expounds on the way the term "coach" means different things in different places and contexts - that in some times and places in means only the coaching of children, as opposed to being someone mostly responsible for fitness and team selection of men's teams. There are also the intermittent bouts of Australians attempting to improve and refine the nature of quality of coaching, from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Often times this is in the form of ambitious clubs and governing bodies seeking to import coaches from Britain.

Then Ian's doorbell rings and Paul and Ian try to hold the show together for dear life.

In 100 Years Ago Today, we travel to Brisbane for a civic reception for the visiting New South Wales state team, and the general joy in having soccer back after the war. Then we go to Melbourne for some quick results; we stay in Melbourne for what appears to be on the surface another sign of goodwill between Australian rules and soccer, as per last week's occurrence in Hobart - though one of regular correspondents, Paul Hunt, noted during the week that perhaps the Australian Rules people were on their best behaviour because the Prince of Wales was in town on both occasions. And finally to Newcastle, where a visiting Australian Navy ship will play against Adamstown - it is worth that he crew of this ship is predominantly English.

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.

Episode 1 - Soccer and war; What should we call the game?; George Donikian;

Download and listen to episode 1 here.

With Ian and Paul being novice radio presenters, the first episode of If You Know Your History on Football Nation Radio was guided by George Donikian. After a brief introduction of the background of the show's hosts, the show's premise is put forward - to talk about the hidden history of soccer in Australia; to talk about soccer's ordinariness in Australia - that it has been a normal part of life in Australia for a very long time; but also to explore the extraordinariness of Australia - the stresses and travails it has had to endure as a sport and cultural product; to explore the cultural embeddedness of the game, or its lack of cultural embeddedness. The way that the game forgets both recent and old histories, and soon forgets them again.

We discuss the limitations of analysing Australian soccer solely through the lens of migration, especially continental European migration; that a fixation with such an analysis obscures the histories of soccer as it existed before the arrival of those migrants, as well as obscuring the histories of regions where soccer had become culturally entrenched, or of groups who had to overcome or exist outside the cultural dominance of those kinds of migrants in Australian soccer.

We move on to one of the 'problems' of research into soccer and football in Australia - the assumption that soccer was the only game which used a round-ball, when in certain eras different football codes also used round balls. But Paul also opines on the manifesto he came across a few years previously of 'keeping local histories, local' - the idea that local people are more often than not the best equipped to preserve and display their history, as opposed to historians from remote/centralised institutions; that as valuable as it has to have centralised historical expertise, it is even better to be able to find ways to increase the skill level of amateur historians across the board.

(for brief further insight into this idea, see Paul's summary of the keynote speech at the 2012 Worlds of Football conference, made by Kevin Moore, who was then Director of England's National Football Museum)

After the break, there is a discussion on what to call the game - should it be 'football' or 'soccer'? Ian makes the argument for the use of the term 'soccer' for the purposes of clarity - there are many football codes in Australia, and linguistically flattening the term 'football' to inherently mean 'soccer' would create an ongoing issue of clarification of terms.

George then digresses into a brief anecdote on the changes of the names of the different football codes in his own career as a newsreader.

(see also an old piece from Ian from 2012 which creates the framework for merely using the word 'football' doesn't necessarily work, and that the ideological push by some people involved with soccer to commandeer 'football' as the name of the game is based on some ahistorical ideas; sadly, the Martin Flanagan article, about whoever owns the term football subsequently owning the future, quoted by soccer people in several places, seems to no longer be available online).

Paul's opinion on the matter is that there has also been a deliberate campaign of shame directed at the term 'soccer' both from outside the game, but also from people within the game, and that this latter source of historical revisionism also seeks to flatten the experience of the game when it was known predominantly in English as 'soccer'. But also that the other football codes have divested themselves to a degree of the term football, using names such as 'AFL' or 'NRL' as the de facto name of the sport, especially in new markets.

(see also Joe Gorman explanation for why he used the word 'soccer' in his book The Death and Life of Ausrtralian Soccer: "I use the word “soccer” deliberately. Of all the things this book seeks to do, understanding the past is the most important. The lexical shift from soccer to football that occurred in 2004 might have brought us in line with the rest of the world, but it betrays our own history. (2017, p. 6)

One of the key points is that the the name 'football' belongs to the code which has won in its respective territory - Ian says 'it is the name you get for winning the local battle', while Paul adds that 'football... is a loaded term embedded within a culture'.

Then follows first appearance of the 100 Years Ago Today segment, and a game played between Maitland and Newcastle representative teams; the relaxed nature of the game in the region, and the 'obviousness' for local labour organisations using soccer as part of their recreation activities; acknowledging, however obliquely, that even though this episode was broadcast on Remembrance Day, on the same date a hundred years earlier the news of the Armistice being signed would not have been known yet in Australia.

Then a brief digression into the idea of digital narrowness - that modern digitally focused research amplifies the possibility that researchers would find only the material they are looking for, and missing out on the social context the game existed in. Also a discussion on the problem of archival newspapers using pseudonymous writers.

We finally get into a discussion about Australian soccer and World War 1. Includes talk of: Irymple; The Soccer Ashes, still missing for decades; the cost of war to Australian soccer proportionally; the idea that soccer may not feel like it is Australian enough to participate in the modern pageantry and co-option of World War 1 commemoration by other football codes; the discomfort some may feel about trying to venerate the connections between sport and war.