Soccer and Anzac: conference abstract

This is the abstract for the paper I will be delivering at the ASSH conference in Canberra in July:

In the contemporary memorialisation of the nexus between sport and Anzac, Australian soccer does not figure prominently, if at all. Hegemonic codes of football and other 'established' sports take centre stage. Australian soccer, however, was very much a part of Anzac and there is an argument to be made that at crucial moments it was more involved than the two present-day codes of football that commemorate the Anzac tradition most aggressively. This paper looks at the place of soccer in the early stages of of the mobilisation of the AIF, into the Gallipoli campaign and beyond. It argues that soccer was in fact over-represented in the AIF and, as a result, in the Rolls of Honour, one of the main contributing factors to the game's lowered significance in immediate post-war Australia.