Episode 52 - Tony Persoglia and the Victorian Football Club Archive

Download and listen to this episode here.

We begin the episode with the clean up, noting that Mark Boric has been going through his personal archives, but also uploading match programs from Adelaide United's first season, which was spent in the final season of the NSL. 

And of course George Cotsanis is still pumping out the interviews.

More problematic - for Ian, at least - is the work of Garry MacKenzie. Garry may have found that John Jaap - the man who Ian had credited as being responsible for the 1875 soccer match at the Woogaroo Asylum - may not have actually been the person responsible for that after all. Jaap may have been ill and way at the time, and may also have been older than previously thought. It's a good problem to have though - another avenue of inquiry opened, and the reassurance that people are still engaged with that research.

Paul then launches into a spiel of sorts on the Wayback Machine, the perennially frustrating but still invaluable resource for looking at the history of the internet. Paul's discussions ranges from

• A very rough introduction of how to search for material within the database, using either exact web addresses, or carefully chosen key words.
• Dead ends, dead links, and workarounds which only sometimes work - and the many things which will remain out of reach.
• Old South Melbourne stuff that even Paul was not aware of including a column from then South coach Ange Postecoglou
• The need for patience and persistence, especially when one is unable to access videos and other documents.
• The ability to, that aforementioned persistence and patience, still be able find and salvage photos, match reports, histories, and all sorts of other details.

In our middle segment we welcome back Tony Persoglia to the show. Tony has just completed a massive update to the Victorian Football Club Archive on OzFootball. In this wide-ranging chat, we cover

• The original impetus to start the project
• What's included in this update - including an expansion of club entries, an index of clubs and names, club merger and split information, 
• The technological framework that underpins (and sometimes hinders) a project such as this.
• The possibilities and difficulties in applying the work done here to different sets - whether that be other states, regional areas, and for women's football.
• What's next in the immediate future for Tony's OzFootball work.

Finally, a packed 100 Years Ago Today. prefaced by a note by Ian on vagaries of searching through Trove. We begin in New South Wales and Uralla and a team from Bananaland; state team selection news from Newcastle; still looking ahead to the North vs South game in Tasmania; a strangely written but information rich item from Western Australia, which includes references to Perth to Wyalcatchem; more on the Queensland team's tour of New South Wales, this time on the south coast; and finally to Melbourne for the results, but especially two very different views of the same controversial incident.

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.