Doug Butcher Updates

The great historian Doug Butcher has sent his updated files for the Socceroos, Olyroos and touring teams to Australia records. As usual they are very detailed and thorough.

They can be found on the Doug Butcher Booklets page, the updates being the items all ending in 2020-2023.

Graeme McGinty has also sent a few more match programmes through. They include Australia v Hajduk Split in Adelaide in 1949 and some 1982 Morwell Falcons state league matches.

The Newspaper Compilations have been given their own page as they were taking up too much of the Archives & Documents page. New pages there include the Waverley Gazette (for 1969) and Die Woche in Australien. At the moment the main focus is on completing all of the Moorabbin News and Die Woche in Australian to assist on my Moorabbin City and Richmond Alemannia blogs. I've also almost completed the Hrvatski Tjednik collection, where the coverage has diminished greatly in the mid-1980's. 

Once they are done I will be attacking missing 1960's Victorian details with more vigour.

Soccer Week Archive Updated

The Soccer Week  Archive has been updated to now almost be fully complete.

Soccer Week was an independent paper which ran from mid-season in 1974 to just short of the end of the 1975 season. It filled the void after the demise of Soccer News, and was soon replaced with the superior Soccer Action.

Previously the Archive included only editions which had been scanned in full from the available newspapers sourced. George Cotsanis (of My World Is Round) had taken a vast amount of photos of the State Library Victoria's (SLV) bound volume which he has shared around over the years. Tony Persoglia made some PDF's from these images, but I was reluctant to add them to this archive for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the tight binding on the SLV volume meant some columns were hard to make out. Then there was the matter of not all pages being photographed, as I assume George skipped full page ads and possibly some of the Soccerpools full pages (which sometimes may have had interstate or overseas snippets). Thirdly, the fact that the paper regularly changed the number of pages it contained made it harder to figure out if/how many pages may be missing. Generally the off-season/pre-season issues contained 8, going up to 12 when the Metropolitan League kicked off, and extending to 16 on the odd occasion. Also in some cases the date of publication was also lost to the tight binding. There was also a period of time where the paper cutting alignment must have been off, leading to text at the bottom of pages disappearing.  

For these reasons I limited what I placed in the archive in the hope of finding access to unbound issues to scan properly. With this failing to eventuate, I decided to re-visit the SLV bound volume. I took additional photos, and made PDF's from them, whilst also adding the PDF's created by Tony from George's photos to the files. This gives a few pictures of each page, hopefully between them providing a decent enough image to work out what was going on. The correct publication dates of some issues were established. Which gives us now an almost complete record, with only July 23 of 1975 missing from the SLV collection.