This site is the product of Dugout Research (founded in 2022), a team of researchers led by Dr Ian Syson and Athas Zafiris. Participants from around Australia include Garry McKenzie (Queensland), Paul Nicholls and Greg Werner (Sydney), Travis Faulks (Illawarra), Paul Hunt (Tasmania), Brett Klucznik (Western Australia) and Tony Smith (South Australia). Contributions have also been made by Neville Cruickshanks, Daniel Soto, and others.
All participants are football historians with a deep knowledge of their regions and beyond and a firm belief that football history has too long been marginal to Australian sports and military history.
The seeds of the project were sown in 2009 when Dr Syson, trawling through the Trove website, noticed an annotated pre-war team photo of the Irymple Football Club, near Mildura. Observing that five of the players were asterisked to signify their enlistment in the AIF and their death in service — the terrible truth is that 9 or 10 of the team lost their lives — he wondered whether this was a unique case or whether similar stories were repeated across Australia. As this site indicates, the latter is very much the case.
that helped to instigate this project.
Until early 2023 the project was very much a low-key, spare-time endeavour. Progress came at a trickle. A substantial investment by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs changed all that. Dugout could pay people for their contribution and employ two researchers on a part-time basis.
Team Members
Dr Ian Syson is a retired academic who taught English literature, communication and sportswriting at Victoria University for 25 years. He has edited magazines, set up and managed a publishing company, and written newspaper articles and reviews, including many on football books. His book The Game that Never Happened; The Vanishing History of Soccer in Australia was published in 2018.
As well as being a historian, Athas Zafiris is a writer and publisher of ShootFarken, a football and cultural magazine. He became involved in the project in 2014. He brings a facility for archival data research and an amazing ability to triangulate the important research sites in combing through the data. These sites include Trove newspapers, the Australian Archives, ADFA’s WW1 AIF site, Ancestry.com, and a range of pictorial sites.
Garry McKenzie was a junior for Dubbo’s Newtown club, many years before and with a lot less talent than the club’s finest export, Adrian Leijer. He continued to play after leaving Dubbo until country football dried up after U16s. He spent years involved in community radio and music criticism before returning to football as media officer for NPL clubs Palm Beach and Ipswich-based Western Pride. This led to an interest in researching and writing about Ipswich and Australian football history.
Paul Hunt is a Tasmanian born and bred historian and commentator. In 2019, Paul completed his Bachelor of Arts (Honours), writing a thesis entitled “For The Empire: A history of soccer in Tasmania before 1915”. This piece has led to other opportunities including writing contributions to ozfootball.net, the FA Hall of Fame site and now for Dugout Research. He has grand plans to one day write a comprehensive story of Tasmanian soccer up to 1945.
Brett Klucznik has a passion for West Australian football and its history. His waoveryonder.au website tells the story of football on the west coast through historic records, photographs, personal histories and research pieces. A member of the Football Hall of Fame WA committee since 2019, Brett drove the development of the highly-respected footballwa.net website, administers the WA Lost Football Facebook page and, for a five-year period, was media officer with NPL club Inglewood United.
Paul Nicholls has fond memories of watching the great Sydney clubs such as Marconi-Fairfield, Pan Hellenic, St George Budapest and Yugal Prague in the glorious pre-NSL era. With a grandfather who served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front he has long had an interest in Australia’s World War 1 history. Paul was a contributing author to Ryde Remembers: 1914-1918. He is currently writing a book about the first English soccer tour to Australia in 1925.
Tony Smith began following Australian football in 1963, when it was barely present in the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide. He went on to have a 22 years playing career in SA, NSW and the ACT. He majored in history at the University of Adelaide and has self published two books on SA soccer history. He is currently the assistant historian of Football South Australia.
Travis Faulks is an Illawarra soccer history buff who has been finding items, recording podcasts and saving the region’s history for 20 years.
Greg Werner is a grandson of a 16-year-old AIF enlistee and the co-author of the Encyclopedia of Matildas who describes himself as a FAB, a football archaeology bloodhound. Creator of the Grassroots Football Project and founder of The Great Save Australia, Greg has spent the past ten years delving into the history of Australia’s international players and searching for the relics that tell the story of football in Australia.