As the son of a Hungarian migrant in Sydney, my brothers and I went to places like Wentworth Park or the E.S. Marks Field and watched St George-Budapest play the likes of Apia, Yugal, Polonia, Hakoah, Prague, and South Coast. In those years, circa 1965, if you visited places like that you were plunging down the rabbit hole of Australian cultural migrant history in an Alice in Wonderland way.
It started before the gates when a vendor would shout ‘Paaanuts Vresh Paaanuts’ as you walked in. Once in the ground a doleful man would wander around exclaiming ‘Program SoccerVorld’ in a melancholic central European’s voice.
If it was hot, men would take out wet handkerchiefs and place them on their heads or, with even more dexterity, make conical hats out of the mint green Soccer World newspaper. These were the Mad Hatters!
It was a passionate migrant tea party, without a tea leaf in sight … I both admired the passion and felt slightly embarrassed by it. I knew that what I was seeing was a form of ‘secret migrant therapy’. Although I was too young to articulate the view, I was fascinated by the socio-cultural elements which a mere match of soccer engendered.
When we left the gates, trampling over peanut shells and the butts of Craven A (‘the clean cigarette that’s kind to your throat’) and the final, by now, funereal calls of ‘Program Soccer Vorld’ we re-entered the ‘real’ Australia.
Australia is one of the countries where playing soccer has been entangled with social, political, cultural and behavioural contradictions. In countries where soccer is the dominant or only code of choice, such as Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil or Argentina, I doubt that the layered social history is as complex and fascinating. In the countries where soccer is the major football code, the history may be more glittering, but it becomes a more predictable coronation procession.
You may be wondering why my book, Chronicles of Soccer in Australia – The Foundation Years 1859 to 1949 only covers soccer history until the year 1949. A very glib answer would be that if it ran to the current day it would be massive book, and I would still be writing.
However, what I wanted to do was research the early years – what I call the foundation years which ran till 1949.
From the 1950s onward football in this country changed, yet again, with the mass contribution of European migrants, and I thought that was worthy of another story.
For me, the pre 1949 years would open up an Aladdin’s cave of learning.
I knew about the 1880 Wanderers match in Sydney at King’s School and I had read Jack Pollard’s Soccer Records which was based Sid Grant’s research. Harry Hetherington’s microfilms about the game in Sydney, Newcastle and the Illawarra also made me want to plumb the depths of soccer archaeology Australia wide.
Football does not flourish in a vacuum. It is shaped and reacts to its social environment. I’m not a psychologist. Apparently they will tell us that involvement in sport is a way of controlling the chaos of life. A sport should have relatively predictive outcomes depending on performance. In its purest form we are told that sport provides the player and spectator with a moral lesson. In a Utopian world reward equals dedication, with the ultimate reward being victory. Of course we all know that in soccer particularly, results between two teams does not always reflect domination on the field of play.
Being a football supporter mirrors being a gambler. Your emotions become hostage to a ritual you have no control over.
A search of the Trove website at the National Library made me realise that there were wonderful stories – not only about the sport – but its relationship with Australia and Australians – to be discovered. The existence of the Trove website is, as the name alludes to, a treasure trove. Its existence makes this the golden age for Australian historical research.
In recent years I spent many happy hours at the National Library in Canberra. I worked there as a librarian in the 1980s, so in a sense, visiting was a home coming.
Among the reasons for writing the book was that I was getting exasperated by a lack of knowledge about our football history by people who should know better: the keen fans, paid media and officials.
I am sure that some people think that our real football history commenced with the A-League. Others believe it was in 1977 with the commencement of the National Soccer League. Others claim that is was after WW2 with the influx of European migrants.
These are all layers on the onion of Australian soccer history which can be peeled back to the 1860s and further.
The history of soccer in Australia is littered with false starts, new beginnings, revolution and evolution. Some of this had and still has to do with state and club based emnities and rivalry.
Officials re-invented the wheel. This has often been done because those in charge had a poor grasp of previous history and its consequences.
At times people were simply trying to defy the lesser qualities of human nature in which arrogance, jealousy and simple incompetence can flourish in a club or committee like a virus.
Issues such as the likelihood of a second division, promotion and relegation and ethnic names in the A-League are now being discussed. This is an old argument going way back to the start of the 20th century.
The most damaging argument was the district versus the club model which raised its head before 1910 and raged for decades. At times district teams were ascendant – at other times it was club teams. The argument tore Soccer Associations asunder in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.
Then there was the national team debate. Those within the game wanted us to play opposition which could test us, but not too savagely.
Our longing to play England was a great story of unrequited love. By the time the English deigned to visit in 1925, we had made gods of visiting mortals and were suitably humbled.
When we could not play the English we mixed with the ‘Dominions’. The more homely partners in the shape of New Zealand, Canada and South Africa became our clumsy dance partners. We boasted that we were strengthening the bonds of Empire.
The English rose, when she arrived, transpired to be a rather obscure and thorny object of desire.
She came in the form of a crusty 70 year old Englishman named John Lewis. Lewis was the team manager who led the 1925 English tour to Australia. Lucky us.
His soccer soul had been marinating frigidly in the soil of the Blackburn Rovers club and the professional game in England since the 1880s.
Lewis’s damning summation of the tour, which he divulged to the English FA, was to haunt Australian soccer for decades. It would permeate and poison Antipodean inter-club, Olympic and World Cup ambitions.
Most woundingly, in Lewis’s opinion, was his belief that Australia was not a soccer nation mature enough to sully England’s footballing shores. A reciprocal visit to England by an Australian team was not welcomed.
By the time we played an English amateur combination in 1937 in Australia we had temporarily conquered the Great Australian Inferiority Complex and actually defeated the ‘Mother Country’.
Visits to Australia by Chinese and Indian national teams piqued exotic fantasies and made us realise that Asia had something to offer. It was a lesson we too easily forgot.
We mainly recalled the whimsical, such as that a Chinese player refused to score a penalty kick in Tasmania because he considered that to do so was unsporting, or that most of the visiting Indian team of 1938 played in bare or strapped feet, without boots.
We sent teams to the Netherlands East Indies twice in 1928 and 1931, and if nothing else it gave those few who toured the knowledge that through soccer one could travel to places a miniscule number of Australians would see in that era.
Many visiting teams would experience a tour of Australia which conformed to a predictable emotional pattern. Parties would land, full of enthusiasm and bonhomie, with flowers and compliments for their Antipodean hosts. A combination of exhausting travel over large distances, cramped accommodation, unfamiliar food while playing up to 24 matches on poor grounds against physical Australians, would take its toll. This would lead to what Barry Humphries would describe as ‘tears before bedtime’. More than one foreign team manager would outline a litany of complaints at a quayside or airport. This, I consider, partly explains why nations which toured rarely invited Australia to tour their own country.
In Australia, football fans have needed to be evangelists for the code, and at times this has not been easy. The dominance of, and attacks from, other football codes and maladministration from within soccer can and did sap the spirit.
We had three competitor codes. Rugby was as English as soccer but was accorded a filial welcome in the northern states of the Eastern seaboard. Soccer, from similar roots was the interloper ‘British’ sport. Rugby was a middle and upper class pastime but soccer was more working class. Could it be that egalitarian so called classless Australia discovered class consciousness when it came to the world game?
Australian Rules would prove to be the most implacable foe, even to this day. An alphabet soup of various other codes it despised, this hybrid – as bizarre as a platypus – prided itself on being as Australian as Vegemite. Like Vegemite it has proven unpalatable to foreign tastes, despite quixotic forays overseas.
Rugby League, which began in 1908, started to prevent soccer from playing on the best grounds in Sydney from the late 1920s. However it was always realistic about its place in the Australian and world footballing cosmos. Later the rugby codes would earn income from renting grounds to soccer when it suited.
Additionally, three major events were to stymie the game, just as it was gaining momentum. Word War I, the Depression and World War II all exacted a toll, with perhaps WWI being most crucial, occurring at a time the code was making advances Australia wide.
In the book, I cover soccer during both wars, both in Australia as played by civilians and played by the troops overseas. It wasn’t only rugby, Rugby League and Australian Rules which have a wartime tradition of sacrifice. This is being belatedly recognised.
It is said that those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it. The test case for this maxim could have been soccer in Australia.
And yet our soccerite (as they were called) pioneers deserve ample respect.
If soccer was marginalised, as it was, in the 1960s – how beyond the pale was it in 1880, 1910, 1930 and 1949? How much fortitude did you need to form a small club in places like Mildura, Cairns, Kalgoorlie, Devonport, Albany, Whyalla, Toowoomba, Murray Bend, Darwin, New Norfolk, Canberra, Geelong, Goulburn, Yallourn or Broken Hill and a myriad of towns in between.
Most of the book is devoted to senior male top grade football. However, a chapter on the women’s game is included and along the way I have attempted to keep tabs on the growth of junior soccer and the role of referees and officials.
The second part of the book is a listing of clubs to 1949. They are over 2,500 in number and each represents the fierce will of a core of soccer lovers to create clubs, teams and competitions in the cities and rural communities. I enjoyed building this compendium hugely. Like stamp collecting, which I own up to, adding a new club or a detail was like adding a new stamp to the collection. It became addictive.
I read a recent statistic which stated that there are 2,300 eleven-a-side clubs in Australia. This figure is less than the number of documented clubs formed in Australia prior to 1949 of which come to a total of over 2,500. Of course the clubs extant now are far larger with more players, teams and better facilities. However ,when we talk about the growth of the sport we underestimate, or more likely, are oblivious to the pre -1950 contribution.
I wonder if the powers that be today who trump mass participation in soccer realise the depth of the game pre-1950?
Of course the existence of many clubs in towns were tenuous. They often folded after a few years. Some were revived. Sometimes it was hard to work out if a new club was a revival of the old or a brand new club. Key dates attributed to events at clubs varied. Club colours and home grounds often altered.
The record I have produced is the most comprehensive Australia wide census of senior clubs to 1949.
Being an historian of what can be described as the antiquarian age of Australian soccer does not make me an eternal pessimist or star struck optimist about football’s future.
With astute management and care this game can flourish. We have to run our own race, without too much heed of the buffeting from other codes. Incremental improvement should be our maxim. We don’t need to convert people. We only have to cultivate and reward our natural grassroots, whether they are players, officials or most importantly – supporters.
The massive advantage of international reach and passionate fan interest needs to be nurtured, not supressed or squandered. We also need executives who have grown up with a passion for the sport, the sort who would wake up at 3 in the morning because they had a wonderful idea to progress our code and just had to jot it down.
I have placed in the book many anecdotes or stories which inform us about the state of our game through the decades, so I end on a whimsical note.
What is the connection between the Scottish team Vale of Leven and Minmi Rangers? Incidentally, if Vale of Leven isn’t the most beautiful name for a soccer club I don’t know what is. Well it certainly isn’t Dinmore Bush Rats or Pineapple Rovers, although I do admit these Queensland club names possesses Aussie earthiness.
Why did a horse enter the field of a top grade match in Adelaide?
What does two teams from Brisbane turning up to play each other in the 1920s without a ball say about our professional standards?
For which international team did an orchestra play ‘For They are Jolly Good Fellows’ in lieu of a national anthem?
Why did female players in Brisbane in the 1920s train at night with an illuminated soccer ball?
What made an Australian rugby promoter bring soccer players from China in 1923?
Why would Sydney’s Metters club promote a visit of a Native American called Chief Thunderbird to a home match in the 1930s?
A favourite phrase of mine is ‘an old dog for a hard road’.
In the congested landscape that is Australian sport surely one of the toughest roads one can walk is signposted ‘Australian soccer – past, present and future’. This book is dedicated to all soccerites who tread the path with determination and a uniting passion.
Peter Kunz's Chronicles of Soccer in Australia – The Foundation Years 1859 to 1949 is available now from Fair Play Publishing, good bookstores, other online book sellers at a RRP of $34.99, and as an e-book via Amazon and iBooks. The book was launched by FOX Sports' Andy Harper at Gleebooks, Glebe (Sydney) earlier this week.
Photos featured here: HMAS Canberra team 1931 and the Balgownie Rangers 1912 from the National Archives of Australia; South Hobart FC 1923 from South Hobart FC.