Episode 58 - All about Arthur Prinsep, with special guest Garry Mackenzie.

Download and listen to this episode here. 

After trying to clamp down on Ian's banter, Paul loses the battle this week, and by some measure.

Mark Boric and Greg Stock have shared the financials from the 1967 tour of Australia by Manchester United, which leads to a quick discussion about the connection of the late Dean Jones to the 1999 tour of Australia by the same club. 

We look at Tony Persoglia's creation of a Wikipedia article on Victorian player and administrator Frank McIver - and some of the problems with creating Wikipedia pages in terms of 'notability' criteria, as well as the lack of reliable statistics in Australian soccer. This leads on to a social media discussion posted by Jason Goldsmith, asking who were the non-Australian and non-Socceroo goalscorers before the NSL -with Western Australia's Johnny McInroy being among the pick of the bunch.

We also revisit the gazette discussion from last week's show, where we look a little more deeply at what's included in that part of Trove (injuries, bankruptcy, winding up orders, soccer pools, anti-siphoning legislation), but also the disadvantages in terms of a lack of context - such as what exactly prompted the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to seek the winding up of South Melbourne Hellas circa April 1998 - and of course a whole host of clubs at national, state, and regional levels. Oh, and Paul's gripe about 'soccer' being changed to 'football' continuing to cause problems.

For 100 Years Ago Today, we're joined by recurring guest Garry McKenzie where we begin in Queenslands with the Brisbane vs Ipswich game, and check in on the Corinthians social events; then down to Sydney for an update to the Australian Trustees Soccer Football Association competition, which we talked about at length back in episode 43; then to South Australia, for a charity match between  two Adelaide teams, and as a curtain-raiser a team of female soccer players and a male team (in skirts); and finally, resolution to Weston and their being forced to host their Gardiner Cup game in Sydney; and we finish off the segment with Ian finding out the nuanced truth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's thoughts on Australian Rules football and its merits compared to other football codes.

In this week's final segment, Garry takes us through his ongoing deep-dive into the colourful life of early Australian soccer identity Arthur Haversleigh Thoby Prinsep. In this lengthy segment Garry covers Prinsep's:

• Prinsep's comparatively brief connections to early Australian soccer (1880s), across several cities and states (Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Dunedin), which included playing, refereeing, and administration.
• Prinsep's position in the timeline of the sequence of early Australian soccer (in Melbourne and Sydney) moving from a middle-class game to a working class one.
• The exaggerated and often false claims about not just Prinsep's soccer pedigree, as well as countless details he claimed about his life and accomplishments.
• Prinsep's family connections, as well as his relatives own claims to greatness, as well as their proximity to famous artists of the 19th century.
• Prinsep's multiple pseudonyms and assumed identities
• Prinsep's multiple interactions with both civil and criminal courts
• His reputation as a bigamist, cad, bounder, and scoundrel
• Prinsep's literary and dramatic output.
• The value of studying Prinsep's life - especially the way his ongoing social notoriety makes him one of the easiest people in early Australian soccer to actually find out and trace throughout their life in and out of soccer.

Episode 56 - Samantha Lewis and researching Australian women's soccer history

Download and listen to this episode here, 

We begin this week's episode with Paul getting increasingly upset at Ian's relentless desire for "banter". Then onto the clean-up, with Greg Stock and Mark Boric uploading 1930s and 1940s New South Wales newspapers and news items. George Cotsanis has unearthed a colour photo of Port Melbourne Slavia, winners of the 1963 Australia Cup, and the 1964 Dockerty Cup. We reminisce about Ian's research on this team, which was one the key moments in Ian's career as a soccer historian. We also answer Peter Eedy's question about the fate of the trophies, including the story of the salvaging and refurbishment of the Australia Cup. 

Paul Nicholls alerted us to an article about soccer in Moss Vale in 1891, which feeds into a segment we brought up early in 2019 about the origins or starting point of soccer in the Macarthur catchment in south-west Sydney.

We also foreshadow a possible look at the state of Australian soccer articles on Wikipedia, via a quick look at two tweets (this one, and this one) which look at the benefits of even minor improvements to articles on Wikipedia. 

In the middle segment we're joined by this week's guest, journalist Samantha Lewis, for this week's edition of 100 Years Ago Today, where there's no Melbourne news! Instead, we begin by following up on last week Newcastle area politicking; head down to Hobart, where the north of the state decides against sending a team south for the return leg of the North vs South fixture; we go back up to Queensland, and Toowoomba, where the town of Harlaxton seems to have produced quite a few school representatives - with Garry McKenzie offering the snippet via social media of a girls' team from Harlaxton in 1917; trying to figure out what it could possibly mean when someone on a team wears their sash over a different shoulder to the rest of the team.

Then on to an article about women bullfighters in Mexico, which leads nicely into a piece about whether women should play football, including references to the Irish feminist Sarah Grand (and thank goodness Sam, who has a background in women's literature, was with us to help us here), which leads to discussion about comparative liberalism of different nations and a whole range of issues. Oh, and there's also the piece by one FAM Webster about whether women should play football. 

In the final segment, we begin with looking at Samantha's article on the Australian representative team which took part in the first Asian Women's Cup in 1975. In this and the previous segment, we have a lengthy and wide ranging discussion, we cover 

• The legitimacy of the 1975 team which represented Australia at the 1975 Asian Women's Cup.
• Commentary on feminism
• Women not being asked about what they think about playing football; commentary is almost exclusively from male points of view
• Ideas of grace and symmetry as they relate to female athletes
• Should women athletes try to replicate "male" sporting traits in attitude and culture.
• History as a cumulative process
• Women footballers as victims of violence for playing or following football.
• Women self-regulating their behaviour in order to preempt criticism.
• Learned vs natural behaviour around soccer.
• The processes of researching women's soccer history.
• The prevalence and dominance of oral histories when researching women's soccer.
• The recurring disappointment of the contextual place of news material about soccer.
• Lack of continuities in women's soccer, and the struggle in the search for deep cultural perspectives, because of the lack of documentary evidence of women's soccer.
• Cultural self-doubt and internalisation of the lack of importance of what women athletes do.

Episode 49 - The name of the game is...

Download and listen to this episode here.

Another week, another episode beset by technical problems. But we soldier on!

We note that Mark Boric's second-hand scanner has gone kaput, and that George Cotsanis is uploading the latest of his interview series to his My World Is Round social media pages.

We also note that Greg Stock has been updating the New South Wales and Tasmania sections of OzFootball.

Altona City senior squad, 1967.
Back row: Jim Mather, Billy Coles, Jim Balish, Bobby Milloy,
 Chris Kalamidis, Steve Herman, Craig Copley, Billy/Andy Rice.
Front row: Ian Roberts, Billy Wilkie, Mario Grego, Davie Cook,
Bernie McCluskey.
Source: Chrsitine Grego-Davis.

Paul begins the main part of this week's discussion by relating a convoluted story of artefact discovery, retrieval, recording, and identification - with a particular focus on nine photographs of the 1950s and 60s Victorian player Mario Grego. A fitter and turner by trade, was born in what is now Pula in Croatia (then Yugoslavia), before moving to Trieste and eventually to Australia. A defender, Grego's career included stints at Footscray Capri, Footscray JUST, an Altona City, representative duties with the Yugoslavia side in the Laidlaw Cup, with a possible temporary stint at an early version of Triestina (today's Essendon Royals. Paul looks at, among other things:

• The joys ad frustrations of accidental and serendipitous discoveries.
• The holders of such artefacts not realising the worth of said items, nor that there are people and communities interested in them.
• Problems with identification (and implied problems with copyright).
• The difficulty in translating passive social media "likes" into more serious engagement from both individuals and clubs.
• The tantalising (and yes, frustrating) prospect of more such material being out there in cupboards and boxes.

After the break, in the wake of a trademark tribunal ruling that included the assessment that Australian Rules is not the only type of football played in Australia, Ian and Paul revisit the matter of word "soccer", and the history of its usage in Australia. These are issues we also covered to varying degrees in episode 1 and episode 7. This time we look at several aspects of the issue, including:

• Briefly, what the trademark tribunal had to say on the matter.
• The contested origins of the term "soccer".
• The cultural importance of the term "football" in Australia, to demonstrate cultural centrality.
• The nature of the word's introduction to Australia, both in terms of timelines, but also where it was most heavily used - initially seemingly a Western Australian phenomenon
• The usage of the term in times and places where there was no organised soccer in Australia.
• Soccer being both a word/term that has been forced upon, but also chosen by Australian soccer to define and distinguish itself.
• The transition from being football clubs, to soccer clubs, and back again - as well as the politics and marketing considerations involved with those decisions.
• The "Socceroos" name, and Australian soccer fans who hate the term soccer.
• The word "soccer" becoming a verb in certain contexts, especially in Australian rules football
• The Heroes of Waterloo song "Soccer, Soccer"

Finally, we wrap up the show with 100 Years Ago Today, where we travel to Weston, where we begin to realise that teams protesting results in Newcastle and its surrounds seems to be exceptionally common; we check in on the boy scouts of Kogarah; look at the death of a racehorse; and note the 150th anniversary of the first game played by the Port Adelaide Football Club, by casting doubt on what kind of football they were actually playing.

Episode 15 - Soccer club nicknames; Newcastle (looking for foundations); battle over public spaces

Download and listen to episode 15.

In this episode Ian falls down the wormhole of Sid Grant and Harry Hetherington's 17 volume History of Soccer in New South Wales on Mark Boric's site.

We also quickly covered the uploading by some pseudonymous character of footage from the 1982 Coppa Italia final in Melbourne - as broadcast on SBS, and commentated by Laurie Schwab - and the value of these items, and the difficulty in finding them and preserving them.

Ian notes that he and Roy Hay have each contributed a chapter to the scholarly text The Early Development of Football.

Then comes 100 Years Ago Today, which includes some discussion of the phrase "soccer rules".

After the break is a discussion of certain Australian soccer nicknames (especially in New South Wales), which followed on from a discussion a couple of weeks prior. Listener Graeme McGinty wrote in to explain why certain flowery names were chosen, and Ian read this letter out on air. McGinty's letter suggests the "pretty" names were chosen to disassociate themselves from either (Protestant/Catholic) sectarianism, or from the harshness of the industrial work many soccer players would have been involved with in the late 1800s or early 1900s.

Ian segues into looking at the foundations of Newcastle soccer.

Then in the final segment we wade dangerously into contemporary issues by looking at Melbourne Victory's attempt to acquire a lease for land at Footscray Park, by trying to steer the conversation towards the historic difficulty that soccer has had in obtaining grounds at the margins of councils, or on the worst public land. Paul refers to in particular to Schintler Reserve chapter (in other words, the struggle for soccer to access land in Footscray) in John Kallinikios' Soccer Boom. 

But we also look at the concept of passive recreation; and then taking that further by looking at the comparable historic situation at Middle Park and Albert Park, using Jill Barnard and Jenny Keating's People's Playground as a guide for how people interested in this topic should broaden their ideas of us and them when it comes to public space in Melbourne.

Episode 7 - Lucianne Lauffer; women's soccer; Knox City

Download and listen to episode 7.

We're back after a four month absence, taking over The Pioneers timeslot.

We talk about what we did on our break. Ian talks up the Football Writers Festival, and being interviewed on Fox Sports for Anzac Day, The search for the Soccer Ashes also continues...

Ian revives his 100 Years Ago Today segment. Soccer is attempting to rebuild in Victoria, but efforts are stymied by ground access issues and players still returning from active service. But was soccer completely dead in Victoria, or just practically dead?

In Adelaide, they're seemingly a bit more optimistic about their shot term prospects of getting a competition started again.

We also discuss the development of the usage of the word "soccer" in Australian culture.

Our first guest of the year is scholar Lucianne Lauffer, who is attempting to recover the organisation history of women's soccer in Australia, linking her research to feminist movements. The discussion covers the difficulties of researching women's football in any sphere. The discussion branches out to the cultural marginality of women's soccer as a whole. We only touch lightly on Lucianne's research on Brazilian women's football.

We finish off by racing through Paul discussing a couple of books about Knox City Soccer Club in Melbourne. You can see Knox's 50th anniversary booklet here. The later update is available from Knox City Soccer Club.

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 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.