Almanac History: Two football anniversaries – Pompey and the Socceroos

There will be at least two significant football anniversaries this year. It will be one hundred and fifty years since Poorne Yarriworri, better known as Albert Pompey Austin, played the opening match of the 1872 footy season for Geelong against the top team of the previous year, Carlton. The occasion will be celebrated by his large extended family and the Geelong football club and the AFL.

 

It will be one hundred years since the Australian national football (soccer) team played its first international matches in New Zealand in 1922.

 

 

Pompey’s story

 

Pompey was the first Indigenous player to turn out at the top level in Victoria and probably the only one until the 1930s, and there have been only just over forty Victorian Indigenous players since then. The over-representation of Indigenous players in the domestic game comes about thanks to the Noongar in Western Australia and their counterparts from the Northern Territory and the Tiwi Islands.

 

Pompey was not just a talented footballer. In his short life he was an athlete (pedestrian as they were known in those days) cricketer, possibly a boxer, racehorse owner, jockey and horse-breaker, artist, musician, explorer, entertainer and public speaker. His memory lived on after his death, and his son and grandson carried the ‘Pompey’ name into the next two generations. During the First World War his name was mentioned by soldiers and by sportsmen reflecting on their own careers.

 

Pompey first came to public notice as a hurdler, high jumper and flat racer. He took part in a number of athletics meetings in the Western District in the 1860s and 1870s. His breakthrough season was in 1872 when he won every race in which he competed at the Geelong Friendly Societies meeting on Easter Monday against some of the best local runners. He returned again in May for another meeting where he seems to have performed less well, but the following day he was selected to play for the Geelong Football Club against Carlton, the previous year’s top team, in the opening game of the new season. The Geelong team was supposed to be captained by Tom Wills that day, but the notoriously unreliable Wills was missing when the game started. He turned up later on and joined in. Neither side scored a goal.

 

Pompey was poleaxed by a Carlton opponent in the opening stages of the game. This must have caused him to consider whether he risked his athletic career and the income it generated if he engaged in the violent clashes which were part of the early game and for a long time thereafter. He never got the chance to play at the top level again, though he took part in local competitions in the Western District for Framlingham and Cobden and in the Ballarat area for Albion Imperial, often being named among the best players for his team.

 

In the summer Pompey played cricket for Framlingham along with the Couzens brothers who went to England with the Aboriginal team in 1868, the first Australian touring side to do so. In 1873–74 Pompey played with Framlingham against teams from Warrnambool and the press reported that some players from Framlingham might be included in the local team of 22 that took on W.G. Grace’s English tourists in January 1874. This did not happen but Pompey would probably not have been considered anyway as he was engaged in the pedestrian circuit at the time the game was played. Later he played cricket for Terang and probably Cobden as well.

 

Where Pompey stood out from his contemporaries was in his wide involvement in off-field activities. He was a skilled tracker. In 1879 William Goodall offered to take some of his charges from Framlingham and Coranderrk to help find Ned Kelly and his gang, but the Chief Secretary of Victoria turned down the suggestion. In 1883 and 1886 William O’Donnell led expeditions to the Kimberley region in the north-west of Western Australia when gold was discovered there. He took Pompey with him on the second occasion, probably for liaison with the local Indigenous people, as well as for his tracking skills.

 

Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles reports him helping lead groups of diggers to and from the goldfields. When her father welcomed Pompey to the family property he entertained the company by ‘singing musical hall songs hot off the London stage’. O’Donnell named a rocky outcrop near the current Argyle Diamond field ‘Pompey’s Pillar’, which it retains to this day.

 

Pompey was an accomplished public speaker. In 1888 he was entertaining a crowd at the corner in Ballarat, the local equivalent of Hyde Park corner in London where people could address crowds of onlookers. According to newspaper reports, on this occasion Pompey was talking about the political situation and the prospects for war. This apparently did not generate much income, but spotting some Scots in his audience he broke into Scottish songs and extolled the beauties of the Scottish countryside. Then the money rolled in!

 

He died in 1889 in his mid-forties, but his all-round sporting and other skills should be remembered today. He was one of the most important Indigenous contributors to Australia’s sporting and cultural life. If you would like to know more about his story, my biography of Pompey is available from the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Readings bookshop in Carlton and other bookshops or via our website at sesasport.com.au.

 

Roy Hay, Albert Pompey Austin: A Man Between Two Worlds, SESA, Bannockburn, Victoria, 2020.

 

 

One hundred years of Trans-Tasman rivalry in Association football.

 

The New Zealanders had sent a soccer team to New South Wales in 1905, but 1922 is the first time that the national teams of the two countries met. The following year the Australian team returned the favour with a tour of New Zealand including three ‘test’ matches and a series of game against local teams. The test matches were often described as ‘Ashes’ following the cricketers’ exploits against England and there was even a similar trophy concocted by burning a cigar and putting it in a mounted cigarette case. Like some other trophies, this one has vanished despite serious searching.

 

Not surprisingly there will be some serious publishing to mark the events. Bonita Mersiades’s Fairplay Publishing has brought out Trevor Thompson and Nick Guoth’s story of the Australian national team since 1922. Burning Ambition – A Centenary of Australia-New Zealand Football Ashes’.

 

There is another coffee table volume with which Football Australia had some involvement. Socceroos: 100 years of Camaraderie and Courage.  The photos are excellent. I have seen an earlier version but not yet the final publication.

 

In New Zealand, Gavin Bertram is working on articles for the Otago Times and I have been supplying him with photographs most recently of the All Whites at the FIFA World Cup in Spain in 1982. The peripatetic German Rudi Gutendorf was the coach but the Kiwis came out on top. The teams drew three-all at Mount Smart in New Zealand, but in the second game in Sydney the All Whites won two-one and Gutendorf resigned or was sacked. Les Shorrock had taken pics of the Kiwis when they played the Socceroos in the qualifying games. He followed the team to Spain and sent back some excellent pics.

 

 

The last international between Australia and New Zealand occurred in 2011 as an unofficial part of the build-up to attempted qualification for the World Cup in Brazil in 2014. It was played at the Adelaide Oval in front of 21281 fans. The Socceroos won three-nil, with two goals from Josh Kennedy and a James Troisi penalty kick in the 90^th minute. Ricki Herbert who was part of the All Whites team in 1982 coached them on this occasion.

 

The respective women’s teams have also built up a similar rivalry and played a two-game series in Canberra earlier this year. The Matildas won both but the gap was narrowing as the teams tried to use as many players as possible as part of their build-up to their joint-hosting of the FIFA World Cup in Australia and New Zealand next year.

 

You can read more from Roy Hay Here.

 

 

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Our writers are independent contributors. The opinions expressed in their articles are their own. They are not the views, nor do they reflect the views, of Malarkey Publications.

 

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