Burning Ambition – The Centenary of Australia-New Zealand Football Ashes
Nick Guoth and Trevor Thompson’s Burning Ambition begins with a wonderful coincidence. In May 1904 the Federation Internationale de Football Associations – otherwise known as FIFA – was brought to life in a back room in Paris. At the same time, in Sydney, newspapers invited local players of the round-ball game to selection trials for a tour of New Zealand. This sporting history offers a glimpse into the idea of Australasia as one that gained, then lost, traction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Burning Ambition - The Centenary of
Australia-New Zealand Football Ashes
Nick Guoth and Trevor Thompson | 2022
The humble beginnings of international football throw into sharp relief the uneven development of the sport globally. While the quadrennial FIFA World Cup, this year in Qatar, has become one of the most anticipated and prestigious events on the world’s sporting calendar, the story of trans-Tasman football is one of ‘failings’.
In Burning Ambition, ‘football’ means that round-ball code, sometimes referred to as ‘soccer’. Guoth and Thompson make a concerted effort to illuminate the early history of a sport often shadowed by Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union. Importantly, this is not a history of the sport’s development in Australia and New Zealand, told separately. We need more stories that reach ‘across the ditch’ to illuminate processes of colonisation and nation-defining efforts by two settler societies in the Indo-Pacific region.
Running to 27 short chapters, as well as appendices, Burning Ambition traces in chronological detail the effort to arrange contests between Australian and New Zealand national football teams before and after World War I. The apex of these efforts came in June 1922, when the Australian team ran out to meet the New Zealanders at Dunedin. That series of three tour matches was followed by a return series on Australian soil in 1923.
This is not a coffee table book, but the narrative is accompanied by photographs and images of memorabilia. The absence of footnotes and a bibliography was surprising, given there are now innovative ways that sources can be referenced for a ‘non-academic’ readership.
Guoth and Thompson include a chapter about the struggle women faced to play competitive football in the early 1920s. This is a laudable effort to summarise the discourses around femininity and athleticism that shaped – and still shape – women’s participation in football codes. However, its positioning as a discreet chapter reflects one of the limitations of Burning Ambition. The priority of this history is to record and acknowledge the ‘pioneering efforts’ of football’s adherents and their persistence in trying to grow an international fixture. The New Zealand officials were, according to the authors, more proactive and ‘dynamic’ compared to their Australian counterparts in the early years of the century. But the intransigence of the Australians is not unpacked as much as I would have liked. Inter-state rivalries and the influence of the English Football Association shaped the development of the game in Australia and how it looked to the world. As a reader, I would have enjoyed the threads being pulled a little tighter to better understand why and how these forces shaped the relationship with New Zealand.
Tracing the history of sport in nations such as Australia and New Zealand is fascinating because it can reveal attitudes to First Nations people and race, gendered understandings of sporting endeavour, the tension between independence and colonial loyalty, parochial attachments, and national aspirations. The tale told in Burning Ambition does not fully grapple with these bigger questions. Rather, it leaves us with hints for new stories than could be followed and told. I was left wanting to know more about the football teams from China that toured Australia and New Zealand in the 1920s. There is mystery in the story of four-time Scottish Cup winner Robert Neill who disappeared from Glasgow and was presumed dead by his wife, only to turn up in Fremantle before the outbreak of war in 1914. The authors might also have tapped more deeply into Maurice Vandendriessche’s shuttling between Europe and Australia. Nevertheless, having recorded these events and individual stories, Burning Ambition makes a contribution to the history of football in Australasia, and suggests pathways for future research.
Burning Ambition – The Centenary of Australia-New Zealand Football Ashes is published by Fairplay Publishing.
Reviewer: Melissa Walsh, PHA (Vic & Tas)