Episode 10 - Greg Downes and international women's soccer; Melbourne Victory and Footscray Park

Download and listen to episode 10 here.

We begin the show by discussing Aussie rules historian Rhett Bartlett's personal funding of the scanning of The Richmond Guardian newspaper on Trove, and the practical and ideological possibilities - good and bad - of historians self-funding of work which would ordinarily be left to governments.

Then we get rapped on the knuckles - justifiably - by our New South Wales listeners, for our ignorance of who the writer "Celtic" was. Paul chooses to lay the blame

Then 100 Years Ago Today, where the soon to be famous segment sting begins to emerge from the primordial ooze, and where we travel to Toowoomba, Woonona, Thirroul, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Jervis Bay. And hipster soccer balls!

Then we chat to Greg Downes about women's international football, in the lead-up to the women's World Cup, and the increasing popularity of women's soccer both at home and abroad. Greg delves into:

• the origins of Australia's participation in international women's soccer 
• another missing trophy
• how the teams funded their overseas trips
• the messy way that international diplomacy sometimes got in the way of overseas participation 
• the restrictions placed on women's soccer by male governing bodies
• the logistical obstacles for players to make their way into the national team - fundraising, remoteness from NSW and Queensland's dominance of women's soccer.

And then Greg makes a guess as to who will win the tournament... did he get it right?

Then Ian tries to resuscitate his Sacred Sites segment by calling it Grounds For Discontent. The segment focuses on social media interactions regarding Footscray Park and Melbourne Victory. Is it an issue that's a bit too contemporary for a history show? Can you be ambivalently antagonistic? I mean Ian does manage to eventually get into the history of Footscray Park and soccer. Oh, the persistent problem of grounds - we trawl across the issue across states! And how should (and are) private and public sporting clubs treated differently, and what are the historical resonances between historic disputes over professional sporting clubs vs (nominally) amateur ones?

We finish the show by looking very briefly at the issue of triangulation - reading beyond one kind source, and corroborating trends and facts by looking at a wider variety of material. This is prompted by Paul's reading of a book on the Glebe Rugby League Football Club, which almost entirely omits the existence of soccer in Sydney to puzzling ends, though perhaps not as much as the Melbourne historian Marc Fiddian's near complete overlooking of soccer in history on the Brunswick Street Oval.

Episode 9 - Religion and Australian soccer; 'Playing for Australia' review

Download and listen to episode 9 here.

As Ian was staying in Hervey Bay in Queensland over the previous week, he decided to have a look at the history of soccer in Hervey Bay and the surrounding region. Digging deeper into the story of soccer in the town of Howard, the point is reiterated that the game's fortune's, especially in rural and regional Australia, are closely tied to the fortunes (and existence or otherwise) of certain industries. That expands into a discussion on analogous comparisons with migration, and then with other sports and migration, and Ian's heroics in New Zealand soccer... and the eventually back to discussing the relevance of certain kinds of mining to soccer, and not others.

We then move on to discussing the poor historical research of the new Macarthur A-League team, which claimed that football was first played in the region in 1947.

Then 100 Years Ago Today, with apologies to the Spanish flu infected week before. Religion is the theme of the week - Rechabites, Catholics, Protestants, church leagues, among others - including references to the sections on religion in Phil Mosely's Soccer in New South Wales 1880-1980. Paul asks the question, why do some religious groups seem to favour soccer more than other religious groups? Have soccer historians focused too much on class, migration, and occupation at the expense of religious affiliation, when looking at historical sporting preference in Australia?

We then move on to soccer resuming in Tasmania after the war, and noting the death JJB Honeysett, a key personality in Tasmanian soccer; and finally to Melbourne, where soccer is struggling to reconvene, with many of its players still absent,

After that we move on Paul providing a review of Trevor Thompson's Playing for Australia: The First Socceroos, Asia and World Football. Paul was impressed! With caveats! The discussion covers:

• Thompson's previous work, One Fantastic Goal, and the environment in which that was published
• The era the book covers, which is mostly the period between the war.
• The overwhelming strength of New South Wales soccer compared to every other state - with the exception of Queensland - and the tension that caused when it came to national team selection, especially when it came to picking teams during tours which spanned areas outside New South Wales.
• The club vs national team, club vs federation, and amateur vs professional tensions, and the centrality of private entrepreneurs to success of tours by overseas sides.
• The constant pining for England, and near permanent disappointment caused by a persistent Australian colonial lackey mentality.
• The lack of meaningful competition offered by New Zealand.
• The tours through South-East Asia by Australian national teams. 
• The strength of the book lying in its eye for particular details and anecdotes, such as the attempt to establish haka like war-cries.
• The chief weakness of the book being a lack of referencing.

Episode 5 - Bonita Mersiades and Fairplay Publishing; how to use Trove

Aussie soccer administrator and now media mogul Bonita Mersiades had a
 chat with us about her Australian soccer publishing effort Fairplay Publishing.

Download and listen to episode 5 here.

We begin with our weekly clean up, where Paul corrects a heinous error he made the previous week.

We also pay tribute to the Queensland historians who are doing some good work, including some work on Goodna and Woogaroo, and the hunt for various Fletchers.

Paul promises to try and get a website up in the new year.

The 100 Years Ago Today, where there's not much going on in the off-season, but we start with Newcastle with a post-season affair, which was a sombre affair in the wake of another war death, though the war is nominally over. We look at the language of the relevant article, its ordinariness, and the role of women at the time.

Then we cast aspersions on our audience, based upon their states.

After the break, we chat with Bonita Mersiades, the founder of Fairplay Publishing, an Australian publishing company specialising in soccer stories. We talk about

• the impetus for Bonita to found the company.
• the difficulties in being an independent publisher in Australia.
• some of the books that Fairplay is looking to publish.
• learning curves, and the collapse of Australia's main independent book distributor.
• why won't mainstream publishers put out more Australian soccer stories?

In the final segment, we take a look at Trove, the National Library of Australia's online archive. We look at:

• what Trove covers in terms of regions, content, and eras
• Trove's limitations
• what to look out for when doing online research on a service like Trove - for example, awareness of the political and editorial lines within newspapers
• the perils of 'digital narrowness', and being of the social context your research is located in
• how to tag articles
• poor scanning of the text - and the ways you can work around this obstacle
• for soccer, the game having different names across different eras
• the importance of learning search techniques
• the problem of discerning who these writers are
• the benefits of registering an account on Trove