Episode 65 - Lawrie McKinna's Political Football; Australian soccer's optimism

Download and listen to this episode here.

By the time this post is up, the Football Writers Festival will have come and gone. Then there's the usual brief spiel on Mark Boric, and the lifting of restrictions on in person library visits.

We look at Tim Sherratt's list of non-English language newspapers on Trove. Wel also take a very quick look at the soccer references on a new database, Digital Pasifik.

Then a digression into a non-soccer project of Ian's - namely an Australian rules project called "make footy great again" - which leads to an odd discussion about how such an equivalent discussion work within the context of Australian soccer. You can see the bit that Ian's reads out abut the optimism of Australian soccer in 1913. Do we always look forward to better times, as opposed to "footy" always looking back to a mythic golden age, and both rugbys already being assured that they are and always have been,

In 100 Years Ago Today we look at a report on crowd violence at English football matche; s; a report on soccer and betting and wowserish anti-working class attitudes to soccer supporters, also from the UK; a report from a game between Bowen and the crew of the HMAS Melbourne, and what that report might indicate about why so many ships seemed to be inclined towards soccer; and the soccer finals at last in Newcastle, with a bonus supplementary photo from the 1960s of a later grand final.

In the final segment Paul looks at Lawrie McKinna's autobiography Political Football (as told to Adrian Deans). Paul looks at:

• McKinna's upbringing in Australia and Scotland.
• His unorthodox rise through the ranks of Scottish football, eventyually becoming a professional with Kilmarnock.
• The nature of Scottish football at the time - ncluding the revelation to Paul that even in the top-division, there were teams made up of semi-pros.
• The particular conditions of Scottish football which would see players like McKinna try their luck in Australia.
• McKinna's time as a player in Australia at a variety of NSL and state league clubs, and the often less than stellar conduct of those clubs towards players - especially injured ones.
• McKinna's transition into coaching, first as an assistant at Sydney Olympic, and later as head coach at Northern Spirit and Central Coast Mariners - and his eventual move into the corporate side of the game, as well as a move into local politics.
• The insights into the final seasons of the National Soccer League, the transition into the early A-League era, and the difficulties of being a small club with limited cash.

Episode 64 - Non-English language materials on Trove

Download and listen to this episode here.

We begin this week by noting that not only is the Football Writers Festival on in Sydney in just a week and a half's time,  but that FNR will also be streaming the event - more news on this as it comes to hand. 

Mark Boric is close to accomplishing a significant milestone - his quest to archive every edition of Soccer Action.

Massive praise coming Tony Persoglia's way from Ian, for helping salvage from digital oblivion some of Ian's articles for Football Victoria from back in the day. Here's hoping that the refreshed FV History page is the sign of better things to come.

Also, the State Library of Victoria is set to reopen on November 19th, which is good news for those who want to get back in there and research - although one suspects there will be space and time restrictions announced closer to the reopening date.

We look at Paul Hunt's struggle to find details of a Tasmanian cup final from the past decade, which allows Paul Mavroudis to go off on his incrementalist tangent again. 

Thanks to Trove aficionado Tim Sherratt, we've become aware not only that non-English language Australian papers are coming online onto Trove, but also that Tim has also set up a map site which allows to see what Trove newspaper materials cover different parts of Australia. 

(Paul adds a gripe about the National Library of Australia's refusal to participate in sharing his decades in the making breach of copyright)

This week we also acknowledge Greg Page's posting of this wonderful Reg Date frame at the Queen's Wharf Hotel in Newcastle.

In our main segment this week, Ian takes up the task of looking through non-English language materials on Trove, focusing on recently uploaded materials from the German and Italian collections. For the German language, Ian tries to figure out what the correct terminology would be for the word football in German, and how the relevant German language press would differentiate between soccer and other football codes.

For the Italian part of the discussion, we look at early Melbourne Italian club Savoia, and some of its participation in 1930s Melbourne soccer, including its 1933 founding, and participation in 1939 in the Northern Juniors competition, and a match report from that year. But we also look at some of the surprising items which get reported - like this table soccer tournament at Footscray's Capri cafe in 1957.

Paul also ponders about the future of non-English language uploads to Trove, and the problems that may arise - including the scanning and text recognition of compressed type non-Latin scripts (whether Greek or Cyrillic or Chinese), as well problems with scripts with ample use of diacritics; but also how useful will languages with significant changes to orthography and vocabulary be to contemporary researchers without those skill sets

In 100 Years Ago Today, we look at a lonely grave site for a pioneering early Queensland player;  skip quickly through the never ending Newcastle season; take a quick glance at hospital fundraisers; celebrations for the end of the junior season in Fremantle; and still in Western Australia, a junior Australian rules body complains about not only the soccer threat, but the lack of support from the most senior Aussie Rules body in the state.

Episode 46 - Rale Rasic; Copyright; Match programs

With apologies for Paul's apparent lagging in this episode which causes some distortion at times.

Download and listen to episode 46 here.

On this week's episode there's some interminable waffling at the start about pandemic restrictions being ramped up in Victoria.

Then to the Mark Boric Express. where this week Mark has been uploading match programs sent to him by George Cotsanis. It includes 1970s programs from Victorian club Croydon City, 1990s/2000s programs from fellow Victorian club Altona City, and National Soccer League programs from clubs like St George and Sydney City. This bit includes discussion on what the differences between these programs tell us about the clubs that produced them - ranging from Croydon's informative product, Altona's more homespun, humorous production, and the internal decline evident within Sydney City's mid-1980s single-sheet programs.

We also note Paul's uploading (finally) of St George's silver jubilee booklet from 1982.

We also look at two related matters which were raised separately on social media over the previous two weeks or so. The first related to a query made on the Australian Football Before the A-League page on Facebook, where one of that group's member asked how to get access to Mike Cockerill's early National Soccer League writing. Paul's answer to that question was as follows:

• If you are a member of a tertiary institution (or know someone who would be willing share their access), you can get access to Australian news databases - unfortunately, while these databases are usually excellent for material post-2000, before that date they steadily become less useful. 
• A subscription to newspapers.com (which is a part of the Ancestry group), which will set you back about $75 for six months for the subscription package which includes the site's two Australian newspapers - The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.
• A subscription to something like the Sydney Morning Herald's archive service, which covers 1955-1995 - but which is very expensive, with a variety of plans ranging from $15 for 24 hours access, to $395 for a year's access. (a similar service exists for material after 2006 onward, with similarly a high cost)
• For the eras in which Cockerill was writing, the only free option is visiting your local State Library.

Linked to that question is why can't the public freely access archival news material after 1954? The answer lies in US legislation from the early 1990s which extended copyright terms. When Australia and the US signed a free-trade agreement in 2005, this effected copyright law in Australia, and effectively set the line at 1954 for material that was effectively protected by a grandfathering process; and that does not necessarily that once we hit the year 2026, that materials from 1955 will become copyright free en masse.

We finish off by reading from the sole known extant copy of a pre-World War 2 edition of Victoria's Soccer News, as examined and uploaded by Mark Boric. Released during the 1924 season, we focus in particular on the testy relationship between the editor of Soccer News, and a club press representative, arguing over who's responsible for the apparently parlous state of the Victorian soccer press.

After the break Paul reviews The Rale Rasic Story (as told to Ray Gatt). We look at the way the book (which was published in 2005) covers:

• Rasic's experience growing up in an orphanage in Yugoslavia, during and after World War 2.
• The progression and eventual stalling of his professional playing career.
• Rasic's arrival in Australia, and his transition to coaching, including his place in the world as just one of many expatriate coaches from Yugoslavia who end coaching in far-flung corners of the world.
• The ongoing subpar state of Australian soccer in terms of playing, training, and administrative qualities
• The intricacies of Australian soccer politics, including within the Australian Soccer Federation, between the various state federations, and among other interest groups.
• The book's emphasis on Rasic's psychological approach to coaching - in terms of player management, motivation, and preparation - as opposed to the tactical approaches he used.
• We also look at what the book skims over or leaves out entirely - which for Paul, unfortunately includes only brief mentions of the club scene in Australia (especially after Rasic loses the Socceroos job), as well as complete stonewalling on what happened during Rale's Canberra Cosmos tenure.

In this week's final segment we go to 100 Years Ago Today, where in Toowoomba there's a "town vs country" match involving places just three miles out of the aforementioned town; in Ipswich we marvel at the depth of the coverage; while in South Australia, we're surprised that there's any coverage at all, and why has it just seemingly appeared out of the blue? And we finish off the episode with the weekend Melbourne scores.

Episode 45 - Garry Mckenzie and Quilp, the first known Aboriginal soccer player

Download and listen to episode 45 here.

Partly because Ian is struggling with a pinched nerve, we're joined for the entire episode this week by returning guest Garry Mckenzie. We begin the episode by checking in with the Mark Boric Express, and as well George Cotsanis - where Paul makes an erroneous statement about what they will be uploading separately - it turns out Cotsy has sent Mark parts of a collection he has amassed, and Mark will scan those items. The conversation digresses into the lack of writing being done by local soccer historians, as opposed to a lot of collecting. So where are the narratives? Garry suggests that at the moment the urgency of preservation seems to be taking precedence over narratives.

Then on to the new user interface of Trove, and some of the quibbles members of our soccer history community have with the new layout. This includes the usual reshuffling of things that were once foregrounded to other areas - such as the page which shows new publications uploaded to the site. Other complaints are the fiddly nature of trying to look for specific dates, whereby several (unnecessary) steps have been added. There's also issues with having tags show up at all, and not having the chance to exclude tags from your search.

Photo: Les Street.

Following on from last week's discussion on the death of Walter Williams, Les Street visited the grave site and found that there was stonework with reference to the Victorian Amateur British Football Association (see right). We speculate that there is a headstone with similar references that has been removed - investigations into whether that headstone still exists are ongoing, but have been made more difficult because of the pandemic.

Ian then reads from a piece by Montague Grover about a women's international match between England and France in 1920, a lengthy article which is surprisingly favourable to soccer and to women's involvement in it. We tease out the links to this game (and the article) and the influence that it may have had on women's soccer in Australia at the time - as well as the story of English migrant women playing soccer in Australia at about the same time. We also look at the broken lineages of Australian women's soccer

After the break we jump into 100 Years Ago Today more follow up on the death of Walter Williams - where Miss Jean Thomas, a female friend of Williams, thanks the many people and members of the soccer community who wrote or sent letters and condolences. Then we have the results from Melbourne; then up to Glen Innes for their match against Armidale, and the prospect of soccer getting strong New England; a halftime update in the game between Wallsend and West Wallsend; and the continuing adventures of the HMS Renown.

Dinmore Bush Rats, 2nd Premiers, Ipswich, 1910.
Top row: W. Lucas, W. Pioch, G. Humphrey, D. Potts, N. Randolph.
 2nd row: C. H. Jones (Vice-president), J. Potts (Vice-president), G. Skellern,
 Quilp, A. Nunn, W. Dawes (Treasurer), J. Tedman (Vice-president).
3rd row: W. Jordan (Secretary), J. Burns, J. Staafford (Patron), E. Dawes
(Captain), G. Jones, M. Bailey (President), W. Thompson, A. Stewart
 (Vice-president).  Front row: M. Reichart,  W. Tait, H. Randolph,
 H. Hainsworth (Vice-president).

Then Garry takes up the matter of where his research is at with regards to Quilp, the earliest known Aboriginal soccer player, who was associated with the Dinmore Bushrats and soccer in Ipswich. This follows up on work first done by Ian seven years ago. We discuss the following:

• how we learned about the existence of Quilp.
• who Quilp was and where he came from - including his name, and his alias of Jacky Lynch.
• a look at Quilp's eventful life, most of which had little to do with soccer.
• sifting through what is and is not true about Quilp's life.
• The sensitivities and legal issues in accessing archival material related to Aboriginal people.
• The sensitivities around white settler family histories which may involve cruelty and atrocities committed against Aboriginal people.
• being careful that Quilp's story is not claimed as predominantly or even mostly a soccer story.
• that the main story to be revealed is the experience of Quilp as an Aboriginal man with comparatively strong connections to white society in a time of great change for Aboriginal people.

Episode 11 - Tony Persoglia & OzFootball

Download and listen to episode 11.

We begin this episode arguing or not arguing about whether there was any tension on the show the previous week.

Then a nod to the nascent scanning and uploading collaboration between Greg Stock and Mark Boric, which initially at least beefed up the NSW related contents on Mark's blog.

We segue into a discussion on the eminent football historian Tony Collins, and a particular episode of his own Rugby Reloaded podcast series (don't let the name fool you - the series contains material on a wider variety of football codes), which discusses the problems of trying to claim "historic firsts". 

Ian moves on to talking about his love-affair with Queensland soccer historian Garry McKenzie, and a piece written by sports writer John Harms about soccer in Goombungee.

Then the birth of the 100 Years Ago Today sting. Oh, and the relevant segment continues as normal, including having to read the paper to find out which train to take in Perth to get to a game.

Aussie soccer stats nerd Tony Persoglia could talk the leg off a chair
 - which is fine by us if he's talking about Australian soccer history.

We then interview Tony Persoglia, a statistician and historian who's mostly based around OzFootball. Tony has worked on OzFootball for a long time, and he takes us through the process of OzFootball's earliest days, the technical obstacles, and the nature of the gradually mainstreaming of the internet. 

Tony has also been working on a revamped version of the Victorian club database, a revamped version of Victorian league results and tables, Victorian players, and a new project detailing every player - men and women - who have played a topflight game in Australian. 

The discussion also covers the logistical and ideological issues with collecting stats and recording history in Australian soccer, especially with regards to the paucity of federation help at either state or national level - and the difficulty of sourcing women's national league stats. We also pay credit to John Punshon, one of Australian soccer history's most unsung heroes.

We finish off the show with a quick chat about Ian's "First Kicks" project.

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 6 - Walter Pless; school soccer; State Federation histories

Tasmanian soccer journalist and historian
Walter Pless had a chat with us.

Download and listen to episode 6.

On our final episode for the year, we began the show with some feedback courtesy of Athas Zafiris, who had a justified bone to pick with us about our discussion on the 'digital narrowness' discussion during the previous week's episode.

In the '100 Years Ago Today' segment, Ian discusses school soccer.

We also chatted with Tasmanian soccer journalist Walter Pless. During the interview we covered Walter's personal soccer journey, his decades of soccer journalism, his shift into blogging and historical writing, and measuring the playing dimension's of Hobart's soccer grounds (link is archived from the original).

Then Paul discussed the various state federation's historical offerings, of which South Australia's Hall of Fame and especially Western Australia's broad sweep of history are the clear leaders of an otherwise bad bunch.

We also thanks a whole bunch of people for their support over our six-week pilot period.

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

Episode 4 - Les Street; Falcons Park; John Jaap; Woogaroo

Download and listen to episode 4 here.

We begin with a bit of housekeeping, including book launches, and some feedback to the soccer in schools discussion from the previous week. There's also some feedback from Mark Boric on our Prahran segment from the week before. There's also some feedback on Paul Nicholls on an old trophy, and Twitter's @jgrb on being surprised that Paul's voice was more manic than lugubrious.

After the break, Ian asks the question what was the first game of soccer in Australia, with Paul looking for a scapegoat for the NSW centrism inherent in the assumed answer of Parramatta 1880. Ian then gets into one of his favourite topics, the 1875 game of soccer at the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum under the guidance of John Jaap, the Asylum's director. The discussion expands into the idea of the "motivating individual" who establishes and promotes soccer in a region or community, and without whose contributions the initial urge to play soccer may either not occur, or merely become a spark that fails to ignite.

(For the Bertolt Brecht poem, see 'Questions From a Worker Who Reads'. For earlier articles by Ian on the Woogaroo game, see this and this).

The discussion moves on to two 1879 games of soccer in Tasmania and the influence Captain Edmond Meyer Tudor-Boddam, an intimidating personality who attempted to push the cause of soccer against competing options. We come to the conclusion that the importance of Parramatta 1880 is its role as the beginning of organised competitive or continuous soccer, something that a tradition can traced be back to.

Les Street spoke to us about one time national league ground Falcons Park.

We then cross to Les Street parked on the side of the road somewhere near Kongwak in South Gippsland. Les is Australia's leading expert on Australian soccer stadiums, with a particular interest in documenting the grounds used in Australian top-flight soccer. We mix a discussion of Falcons Park, the Morwell Falcons' ground, as well as including some gunzel chat.

We discuss Morwell, Gippsland in terms of economic terms, and the unusual factor that despite being a coal mining region, soccer doesn't seem to exist in the same way that it does in other coal mining areas like Newcastle. We also discuss Paul and Ian's guided tour of Morwell with Don Di Fabrizio from back in 2009. For those wondering about the fate of the Eastern Pride sign that Les mentions:

Was removed about five minutes after we were expelled from the NSL.

If only the council was so quick to help the club as it was to remove anything Falcons-related as part of an insane vendetta to wipe the sport out of the region in the early 2000s. They almost succeeded.

— Sebastian Hassett (@sebth) October 23, 2019

We move on to the complicated story of how Morwell actually got into the NSL, and the complicated, contrived, and comical nature of promotion and relegation in the National Soccer League at the time. We finally get into a discussion of Falcons Park - and Paul gets to do his stand up routine gag about Italian weddings in Morwell.

We wrap up the episode by foreshadowing a discussion on Trove, the National Library of Australia's archive of online and digital resources, including its magnificent newspaper database.