Ep. 1 - The Outsiders: Rugby, British Colonialism and the Institutions | Why has this country struggled to accept football?

Hello there, I'm Richard Baylor's from Optusport, it's our pleasure to introduce you to this podcast series, The Next Instrument of Football Belongs. We launched the title in early 2020 to tell the often unheralded stories of Europe's contribution to both Australian football and society more broadly. This new podcast charts football matches that explain Australia and is accompanied by a written feature series from John Dillitzer. The podcast is hosted by renowned football journalist David Davudevich, who alongside John will be joined by rotating guests to chart the history of Australian society through the lens of nine football matches, and in some cases games that never actually happened. The series explores how football has played a fundamental role in shaping the nation, yet still struggles to penetrate the mainstream to the point that it continues to be diminished and delegitimised at almost every turn. The written chapters will be released along with every podcast episode each week and can be read on the Optusport app and website and I cannot recommend them to you highly enough. John's writing is phenomenal, but some of the best you will ever read on Australian football being both insightful and inspirational. For now though, it's over to your host, David Davudevich. Thanks very much, Richard, and welcome to Football Belongs with myself, David Davudevich, joined by John Dillitzer and two stellar guests to set the scene for this podcast series. prominent Australian media voices form a national soccer league dynamo and Fox Sports commentator Andy Harper and the ticket podcast host and senior ABC news journalist award-winning Tracy Holmes. Firstly, a little about John who as the inspiration of this series has worn many Australian football hats. Emerged as a state league star of his junior club, North Jolong Warriors, playing 81 Victorian Premier League or NPL1 games and made 27 NSL appearances for Melbourne Knights and Sydney United. His off-field impact has been immense. A lawyer, he served as FFA legal counsel, Melbourne City Football Director and Chief Executive of the Australian Football Players Union in the PFA. Now he's an international court of arbitration for sport arbitrator and CEO of W Sports and media. And, president of his junior club, North Jolong Warriors, a club that's produced soccer ruse and Croatian internationals, the latter being brother Joey. Now John, what inspired you to write this series? Yeah, look, I think one of the things that I've noticed about football is I felt as if I was a member of a secret society. So your normal life would finish on Friday afternoon and you then enter your world of football on Saturday and Sunday and then on Monday again, you'd start becoming an Australian again. And as you grow, as you take a deeper interest in the affairs of our nation and trying to reconcile where you was a person fitting within your nation, the more I saw the core threads of Australia, the more I saw football and I could never get my head around why it is that Australia, why it is Australia never could embrace football as its lingua franca, as a real genuine part of its society, notwithstanding the fact it's had so many, it's played such an important role in the things that genuinely make Australia what it is. So you look at themes like multiculturalism, you look at the stories of the First Nations people, you look at themes such as cultural cringe, the fight for equality, for women, the stories of Australian football resonate align mirror the experiences of Australia in so many ways. And that was really powerful to me, I really wanted people to be able to understand that and appreciate that and anchor their own views of the game in a really deep place. And then there's a flip side to that which is as an Australian pursuing a love of football, you're not only an outsider in your own home but you're even more so an outsider on the global stage. You know Australia has this, I suppose outsider status on the global football stage that it's not genuinely a football nation and I think that's entirely incorrect. If you look at the great football nations of the world who in many cases are the great historic nations of the world, be they England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, these nations weren't shaped by football, that was shaped for millennia prior to a ball ever being kicked. So football is just a really recent phenomena within their civilization and their culture. Australia on the other hand, football is actually shaped who we are. So through themes such as multiculturalism, the nation that we are today is as it is because of the way football was managed in this nation. And that's a really powerful point for me. So it was this convergence of wanting to understand what football means to Australia but also giving people who love the game an opportunity to rid themselves of the self-consciousness that often comes with being a football lover, that you're not part of the game and you have to actually change the way you present the game in order to fit into Australia. We shouldn't have to do that because football is Australia as much as Australia is football. And that's, you know, the starting point for this discussion and it's been fascinating going on a journey to see how football manifested through all these important social themes and why it hasn't been able to actually break through and become a genuine part of mainstream Australian society. I can certainly relate to that. Now, Andy Harper, you two have worn many football hats, 321 national soccer league games for storied clubs and George, Marconi, Brisbane strikers and Newcastle United, bagging 101 goals. One of the greatest players never to wear a soccer shoe in my humble opinion. Now, you've written three books, including Sheila's, Wogs and Pufters, the incomplete biography of Johnny Warren and Soccer in Australia, and you've been a Fox Sports A League and Soccer Roos commentator since 2006. Now, you recently completed a PhD in the thesis titled Australia's Power Structures and the legitimisation of soccer, 2003 to 2015. It explored how soccer's de-legitimisation from mainstream Australia predates the European migration wave and, in fact, began as early as 1880. That's right, Dave, thanks for having me. And we'll see you next week. Well, anyone who's been involved in this game could tell John did Litz's story, but in their own language, in their own words, but the themes are the same. And the reason why I've stayed in the game principally is this fascination about Australian identity. I subscribed to John's view that I think it's the best, facsimile of Australian culture. It's the best facsimile of Australia's identity, as confused as it is. It's potential where it could go if it could shed one or two things and embrace one or two others. It's just so much about football, says so much about Australia and vice versa. But you mentioned Sheelers, Wolves and Pufters, Johnny Warren's biography, and it's completely appropriate that I'm sitting next to Tracy Holmes at the moment because the two of us were able to share the company of Johnny and Les at the 1998, well, Cup, I knew Tracy before then, but this was my first real experience of working with Tracy. And I won't speak for her, but this whole thing, France 98, was a seminal moment for me. Because I was just an Anglo-Azzi kid who happened to play soccer and doubled in other codes, but had never fully appreciated the importance of the game. It was just a game for me, a game I loved, and a game I was happy to talk about and watch, and that's why I ended up on the plane to France. But watching this global carnival really set a fire in me. And then dovetailing with that, writing Johnny's book, one of the questions that Johnny Warren had, plenty of answers for Australia. But one question he couldn't answer was why the sport of the British, the most popular sport of British people, soccer football, ran such a distant fourth in the Australian football matrix. He couldn't understand it. And then he, as Johnny would, was perspicacious enough to say, "Actually, you know what? It's the same in New Zealand and South Africa and Canada and America. What is it about these British places that have shunned the sport of the British?" That's as far as Johnny could take me on that quest, which was the reason why I undertook the PhD, because what is readily apparent is that pretty much every discussion of any substance around the state of soccer in Australia, zeroes in and doesn't go beyond the conversation about ethnicity. And it's the Wogs fault that the game doesn't work, but it was the Wogs willingness to bring the game that meant we have a game at all. And it was this very insular argument between the two. And it still didn't answer the question posed by Johnny. And so I wanted to unpack that. And the reason why I came up with the legitimacy theme was because of the spark for that very quickly was the late Rebecca Wilson would write an article once, see, and one other. But I remember Rebecca's article about the financial problems at the Cornola Sharks at the time. And the discussion at the NRL Club, the Cornola Sharks and the discussion. all hinged around getting the finances of Cranulla sorted so that they continue in the competition, yet running almost exactly parallel with that simultaneously was the constant talk about finance of A-League clubs and the summary conclusion that that league has no place in our game. To paraphrase, a scandal or a financial problem at an NRL club was contained to that NRL club, but never brought the whole league and it's placed into question, whereas a scandal or a financial trouble of an A-League club or something like that brought the whole concept of its league into sharp focus and I thought you actually don't think this thing is a legitimate pursuit, it's got no legitimacy, this was the start of my journey and so a few years later I finished up with a PhD and one thing that came out of that very clearly if people need reminding I'm staggered that they do, but football didn't start in 1950, as glorious as the European migration has been to Australia for a whole pile of reasons including football, it's just plain wrong to think that nothing in a football sense predated that, in fact the delegitimisation of football started way back when and we can go into what why, what I contend is that had football not received that treatment from the colonial masters at the time, then we would have had a sophisticated developed competition league structure into which the European migrants could have easily slipped, they wouldn't have had nearly as tough a time assimilating to Australian life, had a football competition that was worthy of itself and I don't want us to make that mistake again, when the next waves of migrants come I want football to have entrenched a sophisticated league structure as sophisticated culture, so the next lot of migrants, whether it's from West Asia or Africa from football countries, come in and don't have to ghettoise themselves to some place that makes sense, it's a very long introduction and I'll stop it there we can talk more. The obvious follow-up was wide but we want to introduce Tracy Holmes, so she can get a word in next few hearts, but Tracy you began your journalistic career in 1989 becoming the first female host of grandstand, you've covered Olympic Games, FIFA World Cups and the business of sport extensively, why has football or socket to some struggled to penetrate the mainstream like Aussie rules rugby league and cricket for instance? Well even as we sit here speaking I'm looking out to a workroom of a media centre and if I look around that media centre what I'm seeing is a version of Australia which is not the full version of Australia, I live in a suburb which is Australia's most multicultural suburb called Orban and it certainly doesn't look like the workroom I'm looking out on, but this workroom is heartland. Yeah exactly, this workroom is almost identical to many other media workrooms in Australia and so what ends up happening is it represents one portion, it represents the white male portion of this country and it goes back to the games they play and it's the games they cover and it's the games they talk about and so when you've got media empires that are run by particular types of people and staffed by particular types of people they're not interested in things that they can't see in themselves or that they have no experience in and this is a problem you know for many things in Australia but most importantly for this conversation it is the story of soccer football and why it was marginalised and continues to be so and just picking up on something that Andy was saying about the Colonel of Sharks when they got into financial strife I think the one thing we forget is that rugby league was built on controversy so another controversy kind of means nothing. I mean I think about that a lot whenever there's an issue and to do with whatever to do with doping or finances or violence it's just another controversy. It is but there's no one on the hair trigger to banish the entire NRL so you have no place in this sporting matrix. Yeah I totally get it and I also I just want to back up what Andy said as well in France 98 you know to I have experienced many Olympic games I think 12 Olympic games I've been to but there is something completely unique about the FIFA World Cup and that is you know that the entire planet plays this game you know that you are part of something where everybody is actually speaking the same language and that is without understanding a word they're saying to you on any day or night they have their own colleagues including you at time. But that's the power of it and that is the strength of it and that's the beauty of it and and I think it's kind of weird too because we also feel that whatever is represented in the media is the actual story but there's so much to Australia that is not represented in the media that is most definitely the lived experience of many many people and you've only got to look at some of these great matches that you're talking about JD and your book and you look at the crowds you look at the people that turn up I mean I remember being I'm going to a Sydney football stadium match where in the end they just had to open the gates and there were way more people in there than seats because that is the attraction of it and and it always has been so it's under represented under reported under played and yet anybody out there will tell you it occupies a very important place. And Tracy you spoke about your memories of the 2006 World Cup specifically and just some of those emotional scenes and that is one of the chapters that John touches on via multiculturalism the multiculturalism theme but can you just take us back to to that World Cup and I'll get the the other boys views also. Can we have JD set up the match because I want to I want to I want to you sort of like write his coat tales in on that. We don't want to we don't want to spoil the next podcast. Spoiler alert. We'll give it a little bit of a taste. I think we know the score. I think we know the scores and I but I'll look I you know I think just supposed to pair to take your point Tracy back to why I wrote this book is I remember walking into the stadium in Stuttgart and having a powerful sense of the history of that moment. Now we are underway in Stuttgart. It's the soccer rules in the green and gold. My drop of cure. Harry Gull has died. Australia's Gull the boy has come up with a Gull and Gull and we're back tied at 22. So the notion of motherland meets new nation players from both sides having had this incredible journey to this singular point in time. You had a sense of almost that mystical convergence on the day and people were discussing it as they were entering the stadium as they were having a beer. It wasn't just about that match. It was about how incredible is this sport that on this one stage it can tell such a powerful unique incredible story and that's when I yeah so that was real at the time. It wasn't something you reflected on years later and thought wow in hindsight wasn't that a special moment. You knew it at the time. So if these if this sense is so front of mind if it's so palpable how does it not have a permanent place in the zeitgeist of this nation? Well I'm going to jump in there and I will I will give you what my research found very simply because we have these experiences with the Australia Uruguay game Australia Iran. It goes way back back back even before then the visit of the cosmos and it speaks to the enormous strength of the game in our society's fabric and the point is it's done it with no help. It's done it with no agency. It's done it with no institutional support and that's the key. And so in trying to chase down the question that Johnny raised about why is it the white countries former British colonies the only the only goddamn places on this planet which is which is quarterized itself against the game. What is it? And it's very simply British colonialism. It was obviously British colonialism that exported football of all kinds to various parts of the world. But the key for Australia and places like New Zealand and White South Africa and the United States of America is that the very important piece of British imperialism and they were unbelievably smart in the execution of this. It was it was a brilliant strategy of setting up an international network of the white brotherhood and the sports that they ordained to be the carriageway of that white brotherhood were cricket cricket and rugby and you only have to look 150 years later now to see the countries that still swing biggest in rugby union and play cricket. A by and large it's it's exclude to that. It's a very very powerful point that has had enormous impact on Australia. Tracy has married in to the first people's community and she can speak with far greater authority than me on on the impacts of colonialism. One the outcomes of my particular work is I refuse, I refuse as best I can to talk about European settlement because it's too soft to turn. Colonialism is a brutally ruthless and effective form of subjugating people. I'll give you a word then, invasion. Well, it was an invasion. Yeah, yeah, and that happened in various places around the world. And they were brutally ruthless and effective in imparting British imperial culture. And in a modern sense, the Brits are the only empirical power that used sport as a carriageway to do it. So the Spanish and the Portuguese very obviously had a very effective colonial program as well as evidence today. But unlike the Brits, they didn't use sport as carriageway. And the Brits understood deeply and developed this game's culture of muscular Christianity, of building people through games to have a higher level of character to subjugate opponents, the building of teamwork and commitment to a goal. And it's written, it's widely discussed, it's widely researched. That British imperialism in conquering the world was about establishing a white brotherhood around the world. And soccer's problem as it was to develop, it very bit quickly became too popular for the whites only, evidenced by the fact that it just went like wildfire through Africa and Eastern Europe. These people by definition could not be part of the white brotherhood. The British imperialists who were running politically these places stayed part of that brotherhood. This is very simply the reason why soccer in Australia was never banned, but it was never given agency. This is why rugby became the sport of the big private schools in Sydney and Brisbane to the point where soccer was not allowed to be played at those schools. Aussie rules the same in the south, and rugby league in New South Wales became the bastion of the Catholic systemic schools. The only part where soccer ran in some sort of agency, Phil Mosley wrote this in 1987, was in the Protestant working classes. Crucially, they never had a schools network. It's only 15, 20 years ago that the Anglican Board of Education has embarked upon low fee private education mirroring what the Catholics did ever since. The Catholics got it, right? And the New South Wales Labor Party with their communion with the Catholic Church instituted rugby league in these schools and soccer's never had that. This is not a mystery, therefore. It's not a function of Australia's latitude and longitude, the quality of the soil, the prevailing sea breeze, the amount of sun we have, our distance from barley, right? This is not an evolutionary thing. This was a decision by the power brokers. These are the sports we will implant and support. The others can make do as they want. Soccer's never had that agency, and 150 years later we're still in this situation fighting for this identity, whatever the hell it is, and that's the start of it. The key word Andy is power. It comes back to that constantly. It's the same thing with the power in our political class, the power in our industry, the power in our media organisations. It's still the same people that essentially hold all of those positions and pull all of those strings. It's exactly what you're saying and across every dimension. And so little has changed. Some monumental games among the nine that John covers in these chapters, including the Soccer Roo's Crow Asia match in Stuttgart in 2006 that we want. Oh, yes, you want me to talk about that? Where were we again? There's a 2015 Asian Cup final, but I think wonderful segue from what you were just talking about Harps is the clash of cultures between Jack Dyer's demons, the VFL All Stars versus Slavia, Soccer All Stars at Olympic Park in November 1964. John, can you give us a can you delve into this chapter? Yeah, I'll just give you a price of you that, but the notion of clash of cultures is one that's been a trademark of Australia since, since 1770, let's call it. We had a culture that was here. They were the term we used earlier was invaded and we had a phase of that. We had in the late 1800s, we saw a sparring wave of Asian migrants looking to come to Australia to build a better life, and they were quite aggressively pushed back. There's some quite terrible anecdotes from the late 1800s where boatloads of Chinese were turned back and people effectively with pitchforks on peers forcing them back. So every time we've had this wave of migrants come into Australia, the incumbents have always pushed back, and they've included the migrant cultures themselves. So the ones that had fought the battle, becoming entrenched or developed some measure of life in this country, subsequently pushed back against the new waves of people, which is incredibly ironic. And we see that to this day, and there's this game from 1964, where the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants thought, well, we'll show these bloody wags in their soccer event, how it's done. And they challenged them to a game. So they literally had Jack Dyer picking a team of AFL players, taking on the best team in Victoria at the time, Slavia Prague, obviously a descendents of the Czech community who would come to Australia. And they played them in a match in a football. And clearly, we killed them. And I think during the second half, they sort of adopted some form of hybrid game. But that was, you know, typified this notion of this new culture would come in. They're trying to take their place, they're trying to invade our space, or they're trying to take the oxygen that we have. So let's show them. And it's quite fascicle that they think that they could have been competitive in soccer against the best team we've retored at the time. Hops, do you have any recollections of that game? Well, how old do you think I am? Oh, geez, do me a favour. Let me take you with my first game, and I tended way back in 1903. I mean, that said, you know, it's 1960s. I wasn't born yet. But I have read it. I have read about the game. And as John's done so brilliantly with the various themes he's exploring, they're great little mirrors to Australian society and the ignorance that unfortunately still is draped around the place. I mean, we're still staunchly a British colony, even though, well, I mean, the Queensland ahead of state, you don't have to go any much further than that. But the fact of the matter is, as institutionally, Australia still sees it as part of itself as part of the White Brotherhood. I think it frames everything. This is why football is fascinating for me as a study. It frames everything, even non-sport things in Australia. Population dispersion in Australia is all, in my opinion, a reflection of how we see ourselves through an imperial prism. You know, why the southeast of Australia is absolutely flooded with people in the rest of the place doesn't have every found no solution to moving people away. Is it because people actually can't see themselves living outside of that type of things? I think this in British colonialism is, it's determined Australia and Sockers fate. And I think it's still having a far bigger impact on the way we talk about anything and confront anything. Paul Maverudis, another football scholar, great writer on the game, talks about imperialism, our colonialism being this phantom limb. You know the suggestion of a phantom limb. So, as homo sapiens walking up, right, we've got the four limbs, but it's like there's another thing driving us, or balancing us, or propelling us. And it's this phantom limb. And that's what he refers to as colonialism. I think it's true. So then you get to these jack die moments. And I know that was 50 odd years ago now. But honestly, you could almost roll the same experiment out this weekend somewhere around you to have the same arguments, my 11 year old son at school in country New South Wales, comes home most days, repeating the sorts of slurs he cops being a soccer player that I did 50 years ago. It does, this is the power of these institutions. And that was what happened in 2003 when when Frank Lowe was brought back to the game by John Howard, ultimate institutional backing for the game. When the most conservative postmences, most conservative prime minister in Australian history, quite ironically, is the one who grabs soccer for its own sake. Whatever his reasons were, the fact is John Howard was on the bulldozer driving through with a bag of cash in one hand and Frank Lowe in the other. This is when institutional Australia backed football because the institutions drove it. It's another story now, very obviously we're going through a lot of pain. We've lost that institutional support because of the political machinations. But you can't, as you rules can't get anywhere, rugby league can't get anywhere, rugby union cricket, you name it, you cannot get anywhere without institutional support. And with the stroke of a pen, soccer in Australia had that at the turn of the century. And that's why a lot of people got very excited about the future. And we've had an amazing experience the last little while, managed badly or well, depends on people's views but it's ground to a halt. And now we're in this situation where we have to start again. But doing it without the help of institutional is non-impossible. But, you know, it comes back to another thing as well, and I think something very simple. Aussies always like to talk about themselves as the underdog. You know, they always cheer for the underdog. But the reality is, we love nothing more than winners. And so, if we're winning something, that's fantastic. It's like all those medals we win at the Olympics in the pool, you know, with about 12 other countries that swim. Because you've got most of Asia, you've got most of Africa, none of whom are swimming. But I'll tell you what, you start building them pools and you start giving them the coaching and all the techniques and all the gear that we've got here to them. We won't be winning those races either. And then suddenly, our interest in swimming will disappear. And so, while we're winning rugby, we love rugby. Well, the wallabies haven't won all that often in the last living memory. And so, they're kind of waned, you know. But if you win at cricket, well, we love the cricket team and we love the rugby league team. So, we support these teams that win on a very small scale. And here you've got Australia playing the international game on an international stage against 200 other countries. We're probably not going to win for a while. I'll take that back. I think the Matilda's can win soon when we're hosting the World Cup. But to take you back to that moment, which I never actually got to, I never finished, which was the World Cup game, Australia V Croatia. At the end of that game, when it was obvious what Australia had done for the first time ever, and it was going into a knockout phase, I remember the whistle blowing. And I was standing there with Craig Foster and Les Murray. And we had our arms around each other. We were crying. We were jumping up and down like kindergarten kids doing ringering aroses. It was bizarre. The end result is that Australia threw. And the seeds of celebration and the southern part of Germany will go on long into the night. And they're scared. Hooks Harry Jule. His goal in the final analysis made the difference for the soccer ruse. And here we were. And all the world was around us. There were commentators from every country on the planet. They turned around. They looked at us. They congratulated us. Like everybody joined in that parade. And that was a real moment. It was a real awakening. And the Japan game in Kaisa's Loutin. And we'd been around this football for a while. And to the qualifier in Uruguay. And of course, that being in homebush. There was a lot of familiar touch points. And we'd been to great things before like that. But honestly, when I caught the train into Kaisa's Loutin, the day we played Japan, and Clayton's own former soccer player, I'll never forget. I mean, the centre of Kaisa's Loutin was a wash. Like, it was Jan Packen's soccer offense. [Cheering] And this was, you think, you know what? How strong this game is in this community that having been bashed for a hundred years and fed slave slops in a sporting sense to emerge at this point and have so many people. Completely taking over the town centre of Kaisa's Loutin. One of my enduring memories is former Sokaru Clayton's own. He made his face painted and a flag tied around his head. He probably had half a dozen too many skirmishes by this point as well. Was swinging off the bronze statue of Fritz Walter. It was Clayton's own leading the charge. [Cheering] And I mean, I've get goosebumps thinking about this because you know what we are part of that global community. People in Australia feel it intuitively. They want it desperately. But what they confront as a sporting community is Australia's insular tendency. Tracey's bang on, particularly in times like now. You look politically around the world when things get a bit more dicey but parochialism kicks in. And that's certainly the case in Australia. And that fits our parochial sports. And I've said this not to Tracey, but it's the same extension of the theme. You know, Aussie rules is great. Aren't we great at AFL? Let me tell you this. If they played any form of Aussie rules and they've got to be careful what they wish for the AFL global expansion, we're going to take it over the world. Dead set, if they played Aussie rules in Germany and Brazil, just to pick two, Australia would come third. [Laughter] There's no question. You know what? Because we're a Mirage. We're a smart, exporting Mirage. The whole place is held together by Scotch Garden paper mache. You know, volunteers are asked to produce Olympic champions and World Cup athletes. And I guarantee you that doesn't happen in France, Germany, Japan, America, Brazil. No, we're in the world. But they outsource this sort of talent and this international prestige potentially to an army of volunteers. Well, I'm a volunteer. I love Australian volunteerism. That's not canning volunteerism. It's just putting a mirror to Australia. You know what? We're becoming a hopeless joke. Phil Kerns was on about this. You know, we've been on the co-tails of almost a pre-industrial success in international sport but as soon as globalisation kicked in and other countries started accessing and building their sporting reserves, taking it seriously, Johnny, and Dave, you're from your heritage and from the Balkans. How scientifically do they take their soccer? You know, most of their coaches come out of their university-qualified coaches from sports universities. Up against us. What do we do? We give it to some bloke who pumps petrol and played rugby league. Here, you coach the next generation Tim Kale and then we wonder why we don't make it. You were a joke in that sense. The swimming analogy was really good, Tracy. I want to ask my dad because Crowe is on the coast. It's an incredibly sporty country. You can see by its success across the mirrored of sports. Tennis Handball. Yeah. How we've gone there. Incredibly invested in sporting success. And I asked him like, "Why don't we have good swimmers coming out of Crowe show?" Because we didn't have any swimmers who were doing well at the Olympics and various other events. And he pondered it. And I could seem scratching his head. And his answer was, I don't think we've got an Olympic pool. That was his answer. That didn't have it from his, from his, from his far as he knew. They didn't have an Olympic pool. That water parlour is big in Crowe show, right? Yeah. So it's on a half-size court. So the boys got their half-size things. So they should win the World Short Course Swing contest. But what's one point that I wanted to raise is why there is this a version to football? And why gets treated in such a negative way so often? And some of the, you know, very brief examples I'd point towards is the Australian sporting hall of fame. Up until 2017, there were two footballers in the entire hall of fame. There was Ray Barts and Peter Wilson or Living Australians at the time. Johnny passed away. Baseball had more. Hockey had ten. Rugby Union 11. So how? Canoing. Canoing were level with canoing. So there was as many canoists in the Australian sporting hall of fame as there was footballers. Which again speaks to any visibility or a failure to get the recognition one would deserve from mainstream institutions. You know that. Because I think you're measuring apples and oranges there too. Like when you look at the criteria for how they judge these things. And I was part of it one year. And the criteria basically is you have to win a world championship, a world cup, a gold medal. That's your starting point. You know, and then you work backwards from there. Which is wrong. Because, you know, when you consider as we've been saying, you consider the field. And what's achieved from Australia in that field, it's monumental. And so it's all of that. It's this smallness. You know, we have this smallness. And you ask the question, why are people so afraid? And I think that's a very good word. There is a fear. And that's the fear. Why everyone that comes to Australia lives by the coast. My husband Stan, who is an Indigenous man, has a theory that everyone's so bloody afraid and they're so scared to go into the interior that they just stick with each other on the fringes so they can make a quick escape if they have to. And the other level of fear is, as each wave of immigration has come, you know, people always fear what they don't know. And I've had situations where I've been at Uluru and, you know, nice, well-meaning white Australians will drive by and stop. And I'll be with a group of people who are clearly not white. But they'll come and talk to me because I'm the only white person. And they say, what do they like? Can we talk to them? Will they let us do this? It's like, people are people. And I think we still haven't learnt that in Australia. Broader Australia. And I know that, you know, I was pulled over by a cop one day where I live in Orban. And he had a look at my licence and I'd moved because we just come back from overseas. And I feel really lucky to have been able to live in these different cultures and appreciate different things and seeing the world a different way. And the whole thing is different. I'm so glad my kids got to experience that. But they've had an incredible ride. They've come back to Australia as Indigenous children in the Middle East and suddenly they're being painted a particular way because they're indigenous, yet they haven't had that stereotypical indigenous upbringing at all and they just don't know what it's about. It's really unusual. But this cop pulled me over and he said, "Let me get this right. You moved from Gleab to Orban." I said, "Yeah, I did." And he said, "Well, why would you do that?" And I said, "Well, we really like it here." And he said, "It's a shit hole place full of shit hole people." And I don't need to, you can probably visualize what this guy looked like. And I had a pretty serious word with him and you know, we ended up having a conversation for about 20 minutes and in the end, you know, we parted on semi-friendly terms. But that's what you're up against. You know, I took my cat to the vet there and he said, "Did this cat get an infection here or somewhere else?" I said, "No, no, no. We've just moved and got the infection somewhere else." And he said, "Well, that's good because the cats here are a lot of people. They're all terrorists." And I'm like, "What the hell?" You know, and this is the most friendly place in Australia. We have ever lived. And we've lived in quite a few places. The hospitality, the friendliness, the sense of community. And all of that, that all comes back to football. It's a community. And you know, parts of Australia, white Australia, there never has been a community. It's completely lacking. And they don't understand the other. Even if they live next door to you, you could live next door to somebody for 30 years and all you've ever said to them is, "Hello, how are you today?" You know, it's different. It's not the world as the rest of the world is. Because Australia has never had an independent streak. Of course, Australians say we stand for this, that and the other. But really, really, it's just one or two removed from our colonial identity. It's just so strong. And in a sporting sense, guys in your Melbourne, you can speak to this, I guess, more, but historically, the treatment of Aussie rules has been completely revisionist. This Aussie rules. And we need to get this a couple of things clear, in my opinion. Aussie rules was never an independence movement. This wasn't a way of marking an Australian football game because we're Australians, and this is the way we do it. People have to read the history of this carefully and realise how fluid the movement of these games was in the 1850s, 1860s. You know, not a lot of difference between what we say are the different codes now. We make the mistake of taking the games as clearly demarcated as they are now and saying, "Well, they must have been like that in 1858, in 1860." No, they weren't. And more eminent scholars, or the most eminent sports sociology and history scholars around the world, Tony Collins being one of the most famous of them, makes this point about Aussie rules. Melbourne people weren't playing Aussie rules, as we'll call it, to be independent and to be Australian. They were doing it to be British. Now, you will never see that in an AFL marketing campaign, right? Because they're clinging to this indigenous heritage of their game, like it's their lifeblood. But what we have to appreciate, because this is from this point everything cascades. But when the British were taking their football games plural, in all their different forms out of the public schools of England, Eaton, Harrow, Winchester, all had their own types of football games. The most influential of them was the game from the rugby school. And the reason why it was the most influential game was because the headmaster of the rugby school at the time Thomas Arnold was like this light years ahead educator. He was a market leader in educating boys. And you'll know the book, Tom Brown's School Days, which was virtually, which was written by an old boy of the school. And it was virtually a textbook on how to set up these schools coming out of industrial England, how to educate the middle-class boys of the empire. This became like a textbook. This went through five publication series or something. It was just so dynamically devoured, including in Australia. And so when the AFL talks about the first 1858 game, which again is a date that's been completely debunked by proper historians between Scotch College and Melbourne grammar, you read the diaries of the grammar headmaster as I've done in 1858. And of all the things he's talking about in that diary, the football, as it gets to mention, he talks about his reading of Tom Brown's School Days. Now, this is why rugby got such a head start. This is why the game that became rugby was the first choice of the upper middle class elite. No other reason, right? Pure are happenstance. When the Melbourneians started dabbling with their own game, the point of these games is that you were playing association football as it became rugby, as it became rosy rules. You were doing it to show your Britishness. This was part of the White Brotherhood, to which I referred earlier. It wasn't about marking territory as an Australian. These were Melbourneians showing how British they were by the football they played. 50 years later, of course, things start splitting and marketing becomes an issue and blah, blah, blah. But when it started, it was not about setting an independent Australian mentality or identity. It was about being British. Very, very important to realise that because all these issues have cascaded from those early decisions. Right, I want to bring it back to a game that you, Andy Harper, will clearly remember. 1993, Socker Rouge versus AC Milan. Despite behaving like arrogant movie stars off the field, a huge crowd turned out. It wasn't long before the Italian champions showed why they're considered by many as the best team in the world. You'll clearly remember it because you were the third top scorer in the NSL that season and needed the grand final. We did just weeks earlier. I thought you were pretty stiff to miss the squad. Now, not sure what your recollections are of that match, but I wanted to throw it to John first. This match features as one of the chapters in the stories. Can you elaborate? Yeah, the theme that we've built around that match is the notion of cultural cringe in Australia. And, you know, from I and cultural cringes, this inability for us to be proud of who we are, always have this sense of seeking to appease this mythical Englishman. So tangents to to harpses earlier comment is is trying to placate or please this version of, you know, the British gentleman that doesn't actually exist if it ever existed. And the game Australia versus AC Milan really summed that up a lot in terms of the way we perceive ourselves as football fans, where we were totally prepared to compromise in every conceivable way in order to allow and overseas opponent to come here and teach us a lesson or two. Now, we allowed them to finish the game early. So you might recall that the referee blew full time at like the 30th minute mark of the second half and everybody scratched their head and you see Eddie Thompson tapping his watch, you know, looking curiously as if he stopped watching stop. The second match of the series in Melbourne was marred by controversy loyal fans had paid a minimum $42 each. But I think the fans will be too impressed about this. Allegedly referee John Fraser merely misread his watch, but the cynics believe it was to make sure Milan made their midnight flight home. People were staring at each other, but apparently they had to rush them to meet the Alitalia flight that was leaving that night. So there's a whole range of different things that wrapped around this game, you know, they played games within 48 hours. They played the night before in Sydney. So they played two games in two days. So they put these players through that sort of ringer. They wanted to swap tops after the first game and they swapped tops and some of the AC Milan players did it reluctantly according to Baza and they ended up and they'd won that battle and then the team manager ran into the rooms and forced the players to give the tops back because they only had one set of strips for the two games. So it was just spoke to how the lack of seriousness with which we took ourselves, the fact that we allowed these, the lack of self-respect that we had for ourselves as a team, as a people, to allow the outsiders to come in and basically walk all over us. And that's a type of theme that's been important, ballers got the best story. So when we do the pot on that game, we'll bring trimmers in and get him to give it first hand accountable, the shenanigans that went on. But then in the stand, we've got a lot of people supporting AC Milan, ahead of the Sock Roos and that was a common theme because there was a range, there was a range of those club-beat country international friendlies during that little six or seven year or that decade around that match. And I sort of unpack why we opted to do that. Like didn't we have more pride in our jersey, what it meant to represent Australia than subjugating ourselves to playing those sorts of games. And it's really reflective of the way way we treat our art, our literature, our music, our film, you know, unless there's an acceptance by the international forces or the international experts, as to what we're doing here, we don't think we're any good. We never have this capacity to judge ourselves by our own metrics. We always defer to outsiders to endorse or support what it is we're doing at any given time, rather than having our own sense of identity and our own sense of being the people we want to be and judging ourselves on that basis. And you know, you laugh about the way we allowed AC Milan to walk all over us, but you know, you look at the challenges that someone like Anjposta Koglu had in trying to change that mentality within Australian football. He couldn't get people to stop thinking about ourselves as second-class citizens. And in the end that may have actually cost him taking us to the World Cup in 2018, he just couldn't get the mentality changed. And that's no different to the battles we've had for nearly a century in all other walks of Australian life. Andy Harper, you played for Italian back club Marconi at that time. First and foremost, were you stiff to miss that squad? I can barely remember any discussion around a devil. No selection shock news. No, no. Look, I never presumed anything about an Australian jersey. I never really thought that was my right or opportunity. Nothing was ever communicated to me. It was always something way too big for me. Of course, in my dotage, I wished I was a little bit more perhaps proactive or aggressive on that front, but you know, it came and went. I had a great time. I just those international matches about which this chapter is discussing a few things that they never resonated with me. Even though I hadn't been politicised yet in the game, and I hadn't really, I was still a jockstrap run around after a ball and really thought about much, but it didn't, there was no validation for me in this. I just, I thought then, I mean it would have been great to have been part of this squad don't get me wrong, but I just thought that this is a waste of time. I was just, I personally don't need that validation. I'd like for other people not to need it. I see Milan at the time, of course, we're all conquering in Europe. The biggest names in the game. They're playing the Champions League final three weeks hence. Yeah, and Italian football. Serie A was the English Premier League of the day. I mean, it was anyone who was anything was going to Italy to play their football. So it was massive that these guys came. But to me, it was like, what have you got a national team doing, playing, it just doesn't mean anything. It was a say in a year we took on Argentina and Diego Maradona and a lot more residents. A lot more residents. A lot more residents, because you know, we realise that the difference between a friendly match and something which you're playing. However, what I will say in the friendly stakes, you fast forward a couple of decades, and Liverpool come out to play Melbourne victory at the MCG. And of course, there's a lot of people who are desperate to put on a red shirt and send you'll never walk alone so they can feel like they're Liverpool fans. And that's fine. But there was a fair chunk of Melbourne victory fans filling that stadium as well. Now that was something, even a friendly match. That was something that caught my attention. But our national team, playing against club teams. And I think the last time the high water market, what I can use that term, was when Australia played Turkey. This was very early on in the John O'Neill for 2004 those games. Yeah, that was the last time I reckon that I went to a match like that. And the Socarus at home weren't the favoured team, not on the scoreboard, but in the terraces. That was the last time I remember the away team having more support. And that was a, that was great to say goodbye to those days, right? I really think the game in an identity sense started to find itself after there for a while. There's no question in my mind. It's just so disappointing that identity remains the albatross around the game's neck. As alluded to in the intro, the chapters also examine games that never were. Now, basically the two games and excerpts that peaked your interest were Australia's abandoned 1962 of Southeast Asia. And the Matilda's 2015 friendly against world number one USA. Yeah, both of them, you know, quite remarkable for different reasons. But I think about, you know, John Moriarty, the first Indigenous player ever selected for Australia and never got that opportunity. And I think JD, you've written about this so beautifully, you know, that this is the story that just keeps happening to Indigenous Australia. It's like almost, we almost get there. And then we kick it in your face. And then we almost get there again. And let's just kick it in their face again. And right through to most recently, the Uluru Statement, you know, it's so beautifully written. And so all encompassing for every Australian. And within about a 24 hour period, the Prime Minister had just kicked it into the nearest trash can. So those sorts of stories, I think they tell a lot about this country and about the very foundations of what a lot of people think Australia is all about and where it began. And that we haven't actually addressed those issues. So how can we fix anything else when the very cornerstone of who we think we are is actually made like a pillar of salt. And then you go through to the Matilda's game that you talk about, the game, another game that never was. And what a moment that was the women standing up and saying, no, this isn't good enough. We haven't been paid for two months. You're not going to pay us again. When are we going to get paid? How are we ever going to be able to afford to, you know, mortgage a house, rent a house, whatever, earn a basic living. We're representing this country. Why is it still a favour? And we're not prepared to do that anymore. And in all of these arguments, we've seen it in various other sports. But I think the Matilda's really led a bit of a charge there. And the argument, it always tries to be twisted. You know, we talk about the power of sport and the mythology that develops around it and how people try and sell the message. And they try and paint this idea that, you know, players are greedy. They should be happy that they've got a national uniform. Well, no one buys that anymore. Nobody buys that. Everybody understands it is a great honour to represent your country and put on that jersey, but it's got to be worth something. And if you're expected to go out there and train day and night and you're expected to go out there and sell the nation as, you know, some sort of a prize, well, I tell you what, you want to be properly looked after or paid for it. And especially when you consider, you know, there's two sides to this story. And the men had been paid. The women had not been. And I also get all of those arguments about, you know, the marketing and the rights and it's the men's game that earns all the money. Well, that's true, but that's because for however many decades, the men's game is the only one that's been promoted. And it's the same in any professional sport, you know, it begins. It has a foundation. It starts slowly and it grows. So the men are already out of phase. And surely the women don't have to re-engage every step of that way and wait another century before equality is found. We should learn from what has happened in the past and say, okay, yep, you're playing the same game. We have a national team here at the men, here are the women. There we go. Yeah, I think there's two really significant things about that Tracy is firstly, it really kickstarted the campaign for women across Australia and now the world around a quality of pay. You know, the AFLW was a figment of someone's imagination in 2015. The way League and Union had been managing their national teams was still, you know, draconian. So that was a real real, not a real awakening, an awakening for Australian sport and Australian sports administrators about what their social social, social license to operate men. And but for the Matilda's taking that stand, I can't see how we would have made the huge advances across women's sport more generally. And then the next part of that in terms of linking it back to Australia's history with the equality movement is every single time women have sought change, they've always tried to do it in a very, you know, collegiate, non-confrontational way. They've always tried to operate within the system and they've made marginal gains. But as always, there's been a ceiling to how much gains they'd be allowed to make. There was always somebody, you know, to use the word, it's not Ruth Bader Ginsburg's words herself, she quoted another feminist speaker, but, you know, the foot was always on the throat, just stopping them and taking it next step. So it's always taken a stand and you go back to the 1960s women weren't allowed to drink in pubs by themselves, you know, which is just incredible. And some women chained themselves to the pub and refused to leave until the law was changed. In the late 60s, you know, we knew the public service used to play men and women differently. So Zelda, the pro no changed herself to the common off bank building and refused to leave until that was changed. So all these leaps that had been made or the seed changes in the structural approach to managing equality only came about as a consequence of people taking a public and loud stand. And the Matilda did that in September 2015 and but for that stand. and we don't have what we have now within women's sport. - And I know you've got a really deep understanding of this too, because of your role at the PFA, and I think that fabulous document that I bring up in as many conversations as I can, where you actually made the statement that, you know, Australia can host a World Cup and Australia can win a FIFA World Cup, and both of those will be the women. And I think again, you know, when that happens, we've got one step where we're hosting a FIFA World Cup, which is just fantastic. But even that, I'm sort of, I'm waiting for, I'm waiting for the flourish, you know, we've got it. It's not the seed that's been planted, and you're waiting for something to spring out of the ground. It's sprung out of the ground. Where's the watering? Like, I've been waiting every week for news on this. Where is it? Like every week we should be bombarded with this. This is one of our great teams. This is going to be a great event. The whole world will be watching this event. We should be talking about it every day and milking it for what it's worth. But why isn't that happening? We're very good at lip service. And forget the politics of gender and equality. These are just a great opportunities for the game. Like, you know, half of Australia's population is femur. And the fastest growing sport in that half of the population is just tailor-made. Actually, for the two groups we're talking about, Association Football is tailor-made for girls, and it's tailor-made for the Aboriginal community. Just absolutely perfect for it. And we just ignore it constantly. We pay lip service. Mate, we're gold medalists at lip service in this country, gold medalists. We dominate the podium. Dominate the podium every four years if that was a contestable event. And there is no other reason, you know. What more could you want, Trace, you're right? Then the hosting rights for the world's biggest female sports tournament that's going to be that year, right? Probably the biggest tournament in the world that year. And what do you want? And we will be touching on that subject in podcast number six, or number seven, we'll stay tuned for the exact details on that. But we are deep into injury time. I wanted to get your final summations. I'll apply the 60-second shot clock starting with you, Andy Harper. What can we learn from this series and can football penetrate mainstream Australia? Well, it has penetrated mainstream Australia firstly. It's job is to consolidate that position. It's a consolidate is to clarify its identity, is to use history as its guide. It's to follow science, not opinion. I hate the contemporary way of arguing where my opinion is worth more than your knowledge. Just get a knowledge-based framing of our identity. The game's popular enough, we've shown it, we've talked about it. We just got to bring that chicken home to Roost. On time on budget, good work, Andy Harper. Tracey, other sports have ebbed and flowed and encountered challenges. What role do you see football playing in the future of Australian society? Well, you just have to look at the population of Australian society and how that is changing. And now we're getting towards 50% of the Australian community has one parent that is born overseas. You know, you're seeing this rise in people from other places as first or second generation. That is changing Australia as we speak. And all of that says that the world game is going to be the game that is going to be of most importance in Australia's future. I can't see it being any other way. And so we need all of those power bases that we were talking about before, whether it's business and their support, whether it's the politics, whether it's the mainstream media. Well, they're going to be left behind the main game because it's happening and it's football. The final word with you, John Dittelitz. So what do you hope this series will achieve? I really hope it helps Australian football find its voice. We're constantly searching for what it is we stand for. And how we need to represent in order to be accepted by the mainstream. But it's time to realize we actually are the mainstream. As Harp said, there's two million people who interact with this sport every single week. So we are an army of people. All we need is to shed our self-consciousness, understand that what football has given to Australia is immense and that we should take enormous pride in that. We don't need to change who we are to feel stadiums. We just need to sell who we are. Now, that does it for the opening podcast of Football Belongs. Thank you to our special guests, Andy Harper and Tracy Holmes. Podcast episode number two focuses on multiculturalism with special guests, John Alloesi and Andy Weir. We'll be back soon. [BLANK_AUDIO]