We can assume that George Daniel P Millist’s Essex upbringing left him familiar with association football, though pre-war Gippsland was no good place to manifest that familiarity. Soccer is not seen in George’s life in Narracan, Victoria, the town to which his parents and five younger siblings migrated and where the game was still a decade away from emerging.
He enlisted in September 1915 and found himself in France in May 1916. He was wounded in action in April 1917 and admitted to hospital with boils on his neck a year later. Towards the end of his war George became involved in his Division’s soccer competition. In the 2nd Divisional Artillery, he was able to express his relationship with soccer by organising, refereeing and playing the game, before returning to Australia in May 1919.
He married Rita Daisy Modin in December 1920. A player named Millist was listed for St Kilda in 1926, and Pascoe Vale in 1928. This might have been George who was well into his 30s but it was more likely one or both of his two youngest brothers.
Sporting shooting became a post war interest and he applied (unsuccessfully it seems) to join the Permanent Military in 1938. He died on 28 December 1961 at the age of 67, and was buried in Fawkner, Victoria.
