Almanac Boxing – Introducing Dave Goodwin’s new series ‘Diamond in the Dust Heap’, a biography of Herb Barkle.

 

 

Next week sees the start of a new series here at The Footy Almanac. Diamond in the Dust Heap is the story of Herb Barkle, bantamweight champion of Queensland in the latter part of the 1920s, written by long-time Almanacker Dave Goodwin.

 

Dave Goodwin is a Queenslander by origin. He was born in the small country town of Kingaroy but he’s been based in Melbourne for the past forty years – which makes him a fish out of water. Along the way he’s developed a passion for the Hawthorn Football Club. His musings on Aussie Rules (including applying of the nineteenth century bush ballad form to sports reporting) were part of The Footy Almanac editions from 2007 to 2015. As a cricketer he played in four losing grand finals in Melbourne’s Mercantile Cricket Association for the Yarra Park Cricket Club – albeit he has taken four career hat tricks, bowling leg spin. He’s an appreciator of athletics and of the noble art of boxing.

Dave had a successful corporate career both in Australia and overseas before turning his attention to Law and Academia, both at home and abroad. You can read more about those aspects of his life here and here.

Dave believes one of the gaps in our national sporting literature, and the historiography of Australian sports spectating, is in-depth investigation of the careers and lives of our minor, and local, sporting champions – people whose efforts have sustained the morale of our nation through depressions, wars, pandemics and crises.

Diamond in the Dust Heap explores the life, career and newspaper coverage of the bantamweight boxing champion of Queensland from 1926 to 1929, Herb Barkle.

Australian boxing journalism in that era was highly exuberant, even ostentatious, reflecting a time when fisticuffs were seen as a rite of passage and boxing as a sport enjoyed widespread popularity. The vividness of the eye-witness sportswriters who covered Queensland boxing in the 1920s and 30s was remarkable. They curated the careers of aspiring boxing champions through processes of adulatory myth-building. Journalists such as ‘The Gamester’, ‘The Count’ and ‘Amateur’ played key roles in the ecosystem of boxing, chronicling the stories of the few who scaled the heights and the many who failed (sometimes heroically) in the attempt.

Using primary sources such as Barkle family scrapbooks, mementos and the family’s oral history, as well as secondary resources such as contemporaneous newspaper clippings and internet resources, Goodwin traces Barkle’s modest background, his emergence as a rare talent, his rise to state champion and his quest for a national title before a sad decline in both the ring and life generally.

Dave and Herb have just one thing in common – they were both born in Kingaroy.

So, beginning on Tuesday (Jan 13), we invite you to follow Herb Barkle’s engrossing life story in twice-weekly episodes over the next two months. It’s Dave Goodwin’s contribution to help fill a part of that gap he perceives in our national sporting literature.

 

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